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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Chap.-. Copyriglit No.. 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 




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TALKS WITH MR. GLADSTONE 



Talks with Mr. Gladstone 



BY th:?'^ 
Hon. LIONEL A: TOLLEMACHE 

author of 
"benjamin jowett," "safe studies," etc. 



Defunctus adJiMC loquitur 



NEW YORK 
LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 

LONDON AND BOMBAY 
1898 



2nd Co. I , ^ -'- 

139B 






Copyright, 1898 
By Longmans, Green, and Co. 



All rights reserved 



Press of J, J. Little & Co. 
Astor Place, New York 



PREFACE 

IT will be seen that these Reminiscences, 
in all their essential parts, were written 
long ago. I was at first undecided as to the 
fittest time for giving them to the world. 
But, on the whole, no time has seemed fitter 
than shortly after the long-foreseen, long- 
dreaded event for which we are now sorrow- 
ing — the not unmixedly sad event, never- 
theless, which brings a career of such life- 
long devotion vividly before us, and which 
enables, nay, constrains us to reflect that 
the patriotic hero of so many struggles and, 
alas, the patient victim of so much suffering 
is resting from his labours, and that his 
works shall follow him. 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



Introduction i 

Talks in 1856-1870 , . . .15 
Talks in 1891-1896 . . . .41 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 



INTRODUCTION 

Quid volui, demens, humeris imponere tantum 
Ponderis ? 

I SAW something of Mr. Gladstone between 
1856 and 1870 in England; and, after an 
interval of twenty years, I saw much of him 
at Biarritz. In reporting a few of the things 
that he said to me during the earlier period, 
I have to trust my memory entirely. His 
remarks during the later period have been 
carefully noted down. I am, therefore, 
confident that those remarks are reported 
with accuracy. Naturally, however, my 
attention was concentrated on Mr. Glad- 
stone's observations ; and I must add that 
the effort of committing those observations 
to memory, and likewise of replying to 
them, was such that I cannot pretend that 
my own part in the conversation is given 

I 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

with equal exactness. But this, of course, 
is a matter of minor importance. Another 
of my Boswellian canons ought, perhaps, to 
be disclosed. Several times my conversa- 
tions with Mr. Gladstone were interrupted 
just when he was entering on an important 
subject; and I naturally endeavoured, dur- 
ing one or more subsequent interviews, to 
draw him out more thoroughly. When the 
drawing-out process had been completed 
and I had to make a final report of all that 
he had said, I had to choose between two 
alternatives, each of them open to objection. 
Sometimes I thought it safer to observe 
strict accuracy by referring the two or more 
mutually supplementing, not to say over- 
lapping, conversations to the times when 
they respectively occurred. But more fre- 
quently I have consulted the convenience 
of my readers by following a logical, instead 
of a chronological arrangement, and by sol- 
dering together the disunited parts of what 
was practically a single dialogue. 

In preparing to add to my literary gallery 
its most conspicuous portrait, I am con- 
fronted with the question : In order to 
concentrate attention on the portrait itself, 
ought not its frame to be as simple as pos- 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

sible? Or, to lay aside metaphor, ought I 
not to restrict myself to the mechanical 
office of Boswellising Mr. Gladstone, and to 
leave the thankless task of criticising him 
to such biographers as are at once compelled 
and competent to discharge it? The ques- 
tion, when thus put, seems to answer itself ; 
but the matter, in fact, is not so simple as 
at first sight appears. On the whole, the 
self-denying ordinance which I am inclined 
to impose on myself is this, that I should 
in general not presume to sit in judgment 
on Mr. Gladstone except in cases where my 
intercourse with him serves to throw light 
on some misunderstood parts of his char- 
acter; or where, on the other hand, some 
remarks on his character are needed to throw 
light on my intercourse with him. 

On neither of these two accounts do I feel 
called upon to say much about him as a 
statesman. Being forced to spend three- 
quarters of every year on the Continent in 
a sort of valetudinarian exile, I have come 
to regard myself, not certainly as an outlaw, 
but as what I may call an otctpolitics, — as one 
who can look on party politics only from the 
standpoint of a philosophical outsider; so 
that, for this as well as for other reasons, 

3 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I abstain from acting the part of a political 
censor. And this abstinence is, in the pres- 
ent case, made easier by the fact that the 
tie which bound him to me and mine was 
not political, but personal. He was a county 
neighbour of my Conservative father and of 
my more Conservative father-in-law (the late 
Lord Egerton of Tatton). When he and 
they were in the House of Commons to- 
gether, he met them on a footing of friendly 
opposition; and although the political an- 
tagonism went on increasing, the friendly 
relations were perhaps not lessened down to 
the end of the chapter. The result of all 
this was that, when he extended his friend- 
ship to my wife and me, he showed a mani- 
fest disinclination to discuss the politics of 
the day. He seldom approached burning 
questions in my presence, and hardly ever 
in the presence of my wife. I could have 
wished that he had been less scrupulous; 
but perhaps, after all, the loss was not very 
serious. The political Gladstone has long 
been, and will long continue to be, in every- 
body's mouth. It is of the non-political 
Gladstone that people in general need to 
learn something. 

When I pass on from the public to the 

4 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

private character of Mr. Gladstone, I am 
only too sensible alike of the difficulty and 
of the necessity of touching on that most 
delicate part of my subject. To quote 
Cicero: " Quid dicam de moribus facillimis, 
de bonitate in suos, justitia in omnes?" 
( What should I say of the easy urbanity of 
his mannerSy of his goodness to his intimates^ 
of his justice towards all men f) What, in 
particular, should I say, or forbear to say, 
about Mr. Gladstone's great kindness to 
me? Compliments, however sincere and 
however well deserved, have nearly always 
an air of patronage; and, indeed, I have 
sometimes thought that the step from the 
sublime to the ridiculous is perhaps less 
short than the step from an ill-turned or ill- 
timed compliment to an insult. Those of 
us who are haunted by any such impression 
as is here indicated are naturally disposed, 
in relation to Mr. Gladstone's private vir- 
tues, to say less than we feel, or rather to 
keep silence even from good words. Never- 
theless, it would be churlish in us to refrain 
altogether from bearing our eye-witnessing 
testimony to his considerate and uncon- 
descending graciousness towards such of his 
juniors as he befriended. And we ourselves 

5 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

are led to do this all the more in order, so 
to say, to take away the unpleasing taste 
of the few words of adverse criticism which 
will perforce make their way into the follow- 
ing pages. Let it, then, be understood once 
for all that, however we may have differed 
from his views both on things present and 
on things to come, we nevertheless judge 
him to have exhibited an absolutely unique 
combination of political sagacity with an un- 
wavering conviction of the Divine presence 
and support ; so that we might almost liter- 
ally apostrophise him in the phrase of the 
Greek poet — 

*^ drdpwv 6s Ttpc^ror sv rs ^vuq)opaii (3iov 
Hpivovrei Ev re daijuovoov t,vr aXXay aii,'^^ 

I have mentioned that Mr. Gladstone, in 
his intercourse with me, seldom penetrated 
within the recesses of politics. He, how- 
ever, often led me into what may be called 
the antechamber of politics. He freely im- 
parted to me his reminiscences; and those 
reminiscences were interspersed with sug- 
gestive comments, and had always, if I may 
so express it, a quorum pars magna fui 
flavour about them. When he was disposed 
to dwell on this interesting subject, I did my 

6 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

best to make him stick to it ; and, on other 
occasions, I threw the subject in his path. 
His anecdotical reflections on such men as 
Canning and Peel, as Lord Palmerston and 
Disraeli, are reported with the utmost pos- 
sible minuteness. 

There were, however, subjects on which 
he conversed with less interest and effect, 
and in reference to which my duties as a 
reporter were less clear. Of those less im- 
portant remarks of his, should any, or 
should all, be placed before my readers? 
An example will serve to show the nature 
of my perplexity. How much am I to 
record of my impressions of Mr. Gladstone's 
views on Homer's ethics and theology? My 
introduction to those views took place in an 
odd manner. In my Oxford days I heard a 
lady ask Jowett what he thought of Mr. 
Gladstone's then recently published book 
on Homer. " It's mere nonsense," was the 
brief answer. Without passing so summary 
a verdict on Mr. Gladstone's work, or pre- 
suming to speak on the subject as an expert, 
I am at least aware that, as Juvenal might 
have said, he made the Syrian Jordan flow 
into the Scamander: he Catholicised Hellen- 
ism and almost canonised Homer. Indeed, 

7 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

it was with reference to Hansel's Bampton 
Lectures and Mr. Gladstone's Homeric 
speculation that, some forty years ago, the 
future Bishop Jeune said to Bishop Wilber- 
force that he " had not expected to see the 
time when Atheism would be demonstrated 
from the pulpit of St. Mary's, and when the 
member for the University of Oxford would 
advocate the worship of the Pagan divini- 
ties " {Safe Studies, p. 247). He evidently 
held, as I also hold, that Mr. Gladstone was 
utterly at fault when he tried to discover a 
defaced or rudimentary Trinity amid the 
debris of the Hellenic Pantheon. And, for 
myself, I will further maintain that from 
Mr. Gladstone's initial error in this matter — 
from his invention, if I may so say, of an 
Athanasian Iliad — has arisen a false note 
in many of his utterances on Homer. How 
much, then, am I to report of such of those 
utterances as I heard? To this question I 
reply that, if the intimacy with which he 
honoured me had been continued and con- 
tinually renewed through many years, in- 
stead of being practically confined to a score 
or so of conversations, I should doubtless, 
in my report of his sayings about Homer, 
have used the pruning-knife pretty freely. 

8 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

But, as the case now stands, and as my 
readers will doubtless wish to see something 
even of the less interesting aspects of this 
eminently interesting character, I have 
thought it better to reduce the pruning 
process to a minimum. Nor will such an 
examination of his defective side be unprofit- 
able. For, in very truth, the saying of Cato 
that ** wise men learn more from fools than 
fools learn from wise men," may be supple- 
mented with a corollary that more is to be 
learnt front the follies of the wise than from, 
the com^mon sense of fools. And to the case 
now before us such a corollary has a special 
application. For the Homeric hallucination, 
as I cannot but think it, of Mr. Gladstone 
was no mere excrescence or (so to say) lusus 
sapienticBy but was correlated with the rest 
of his spiritual growth ; it was, in fact, not 
so much the vagary of a scholar as the sorry 
refuge of a theologian at bay. Let us see 
how this is to be explained. The Compara- 
tive Method or, let us rather say, the Evolu- 
tionary Principle, when applied to the com- 
peting religions of the world, tends to bring 
out what they have in common, to group 
them all under a single law, and, if I may 
so say, to lessen the extreme inequality of 

9 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

rank which has hitherto prevailed among 
them. It is true that to Evolution, inter- 
preted in this wide sense, Mr. Gladstone 
would have strongly objected. But none 
the less is it probable that, without knowing 
it, he had a sprinkling from the impetuous 
and ubiquitous " stream of tendency." He 
caught the evolutionary contagion. He be- 
came so far a philosophe vtalgrd lui that he 
more or less levelled up the chief religions, 
as the alternative to levelling them down. 
Something of the divine he had to recog- 
nise in all of them, lest haply he should be 
constrained to erase the divine from all of 
them. Thus he gradually came to regard 
the greatest poets of Hellenism as more or 
less inspired, not merely in the colloquial 
and metaphorical, but in something like the 
theological sense of the word — inspired, one 
may say vaguely, not merely from Mount 
Helicon, but from Mount Zion. So that he 
essayed to hear, and at last imagined that 
he really heard, the far-off echo of a revela- 
tion in Homer. 

The general line that I have taken about 
the indirectly theological views of Mr. Glad- 
stone may be extended to his directly theo- 
logical views. But between the two cases 

10 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

there is a difference. Most of my readers 
will probably agree with me in not attaching 
much weight to his Homeric speculations. 
But many of them will attach far more 
weight than I should to his opinions on the- 
ology. Therefore, what he said to me on 
the latter subject is reported almost entire. 
In conclusion, I need hardly insist that I 
am entering into no sort of competition with 
any complete biography of Mr. Gladstone 
which may have been, or may hereafter be, 
brought out by one or more distinguished 
men who have known him intimately both 
in his public and private character. How, 
indeed, could I, handicapped as I am, ad- 
venture on such an unequal race? 

" Quid enim tremulis facere artubus hasdi 
Consimile in cursu possint et fortis equi vis ? " 

Let me then say, or rather repeat, that 
my present function is to produce what may 
be called an ethograph of Mr. Gladstone — a 
photograph of his moral and social physi- 
ognomy, exactly as it presented itself to me. 
Nor can I doubt that, somewhat in the spirit 
of Cromwell, he would himself have wished 
that impartial justice should be done to that 
moral physiognomy, a physiognomy which. 



II 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

like his natural face, had its harsh and un- 
toward aspects, but which was all the more 
truly venerable for its wrinkled and, at first 
sight, repellent grandeur. It is superfluous 
for me to add that I shall be more than satis- 
fied if, in the bewildering chapter of acci-. 
dents, it should be written that even this 
little book is to contribute its jot and tittle 
of evidence, at once trustworthy and favour- 
able, towards the final judgment which will 
be pronounced on him by posterity. Habent 
sua fata libelli: singular fates they have 
sometimes, and such as, when little is ex- 
pected, are not always disappointing. 

L. A. T. 



NOTE 

Since writing this, I Iiave come across a saying of 
Tennyson about Mr. Gladstone's Homeric specula- 
tions, which confirms the view taken in the forego- 
ing pages: "Very pleasant and very interesting 
he [Gladstone] was, even when he discoursed on 
Homer, where most people think him a little hobby- 
horsical : let him be. His hobby-horse is of the in- 
tellect and with a grace." This opinion should be 
compared or contrasted with the opinion entertained 
by Lake. In a letter of mine, entitled " Dr. Lake 

12 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

at Balliol," which was published in the Spectator 
(Jan. I, 1898), there is a passage which I am tempted 
to quote, concluding as it does with a high and just 
compliment paid by the future Dean of Durham to 
Mr. Gladstone. It should be mentioned that the 
conversation referred to occurred in my undergrad- 
uate days, some forty years ago. " I once found 
Lake reading Mr. Gladstone's book on Homer, 
which had then been recently published, and I re- 
marked to him that, in Jowett's opinion, the distin- 
guished author had ascribed more to Homer than 
Homer himself ever dreamt of; was this criticism 
just? 'Possibly to some extent,' answered Lake, 
with a grim smile. • But Mr. Jowett would al- 
low only a minimum. I think there is more in 
Homer, just as I think there is more in the Bible, 
than he would acknowledge.' Then, with an evi- 
dent allusion to my veneration for Jowett, he touched 
on the propensity of youth towards somewhat pro- 
miscuous hero-worship. His concluding words have 
stuck in my memory : * In all my life I have only 
known three men of commanding greatness — Arnold, 
Newman, Gladstone.' " 



13 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 
1856-1870 



" Nee vero ille in luce modo atque in oculis civium 
magnus, sed intus domique praestantior." 

Cicero. 

" Seen him I have, but in his happier hour 
Of social pleasure, ill-exchanged for power." 

Pope. 

IT was a proud moment for me when Mr. 
Gladstone, who was then canvassing the 
Oxford electors, called on me during my 
first year of residence at Balliol. Between 
1856 and 1870 I saw him several times, 
chiefly in London and during two visits 
which I paid at Hawarden. But, instead of 
wearying my readers with the whereabouts 
and the whenabouts of my interviews with 
him, I will at once jot down some sayings 
of his which belong to this first period of 
our acquaintance. 

My father, not realising to what extent I 

was handicapped by physical drawbacks, 

was continually urging me to go to the Bar. 

At his request, I laid the matter before Mr. 

2 17 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Gladstone. Mr. Gladstone thought that my 
extreme nearsightedness would be an almost 
insuperable obstacle to my success at the 
Bar. I asked him if I should try diplomacy. 
His reply was not encouraging. Indeed, he 
said that he should not wish a son of his to 
become a diplomatist. He did not give his 
reasons ; but I suspect that a thought was in 
his mind similar to that which prompted 
Macaulay to write : * * Every calling has its 
peculiar temptations. There is no injustice 
in saying that diplomatists, as a class, have 
always been more distinguished by their 
address, by the art with which they win the 
confidence of those with whom they have to 
deal, and by the ease with which they catch 
the tone of every society into which they are 
admitted, than by generous enthusiasm or 
austere rectitude." 

He went on to recommend to me a Parlia- 
mentary career; Parliamentary work would 
be less trying to the eyesight than practice 
at the Bar. He presently spoke of * ' ofificial 
life. Since he had been in ofifice, he had 
learnt how much of the business could be 
deputed to trained subordinates; indeed, 
he had bestowed some pains on the art of 
thus working by proxy. Had I ever thought 

i8 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

of trying to get into the House of Commons ? 
I replied that I had turned Whig, to the 
no small perturbation of my kinsfolk. My 
father, who was then in the House of Com- 
mons, and who was a strong aristocrat and 
a still stronger autocrat, would never have 
tolerated my voting against him on any 
question which he deemed important. Mr. 
Gladstone seemed surprised, and added that 
public opinion appeared to him to be in an 
unhealthy state in regard to the nature and 
limits of th.^ patria potestas. If a son of his 
own had differed from him in politics, he 
would have advised him not to enter public 
life till he was twenty-six; after that age, 
the son would be free to take an independent 
line. Mr. Gladstone thought it monstrous 
that Lord Stanley (the late Lord Derby), 
who was then about forty years old, should 
be practically compelled to join the Con- 
servative party, in opposition to what were 
believed to be his private convictions. At 
the time of this conversation I myself was 
in my twenty-fifth year. Mr. Gladstone 
advised me to decide on a profession soon. 
After twenty-five the mind could not easily 
take a fresh direction, though it might make 
great progress in a direction already taken. 

19 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

He did not, let me here repeat, often talk 
to me about politics ; but I remember his 
once saying, with great emphasis, that the 
years which followed the close of the Great 
War seemed to him to be among the most 
disgraceful in our history: " The Tory Gov- 
ernment passed a new Corn Law." 

I asked him whether he did not think that 
the days of the English aristocracy were 
numbered. Might not what Tennyson says 
of religious systems be applied to aristocra- 
cies: ** They have their day, and cease to 
be "? In other words, was not De Tocque- 
ville right in thinking that, by an inexorable 
law, all things make for democracy? Mr. 
Gladstone answered that this broad state- 
ment of De Tocqueville appeared to him to 
be founded on a hasty generalisation. In 
particular, he thought that the feudal senti- 
ment and traditions were deeply rooted in 
England. He defended his opinion by citing 
two examples which, I own, did not appear 
to me very conclusive. One of them I will 
repeat, as nearly as I can remember it. He 
told me that a certain peer, who was a friend 
of his, had recently died. He himself had 
consulted the man of business as to the 
choice of an agent who would give satisfac- 

20 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

tion to the tenants. The man of business 
replied that what would please the tenants 
most would be the appointment of an 
agent who could claim kinship with the late 
lord. 

In July 1864, I was so fortunate as to 
meet Mr. Mill at breakfast with Mr. Glad- 
stone.'^ The two eminent men talked about 
the probable effect of the war between Prussia 
and Denmark. Mr. Gladstone mentioned 
that a high financial authority had expressed 
the opinion that, if Canada were ever an- 
nexed by the United States, the value of 
land in Canada would be greatly increased 
(I think he said " doubled "); and I under- 
stood Mr. Gladstone to add that, in like 

* Some fragments of the remarks made by Mr. Mill on 
this, to me, memorable occasion, are indicated in Safe 
Studies, p. 263, and in the Memoir of Jozvett, p. loi 
(note). I am tempted here to report another observation 
which Mr. Mill then made. He told me that his father 
used to say that all war would speedily be brought to an 
end if only, in every battle, the soldiers on each side would 
direct all their efforts towards shooting the commander-in- 
chief of the opposite party. I asked him whether, if this 
practice were set on foot, commanders-in-chief would not 
soon learn, like Ahab at Ramoth Gilead, to resort to the 
obvious expedient of a disguise. '* Yes," he replied 
gloomily, ' ' I am afraid that the causes of war lie too deep 
for so simple a remedy." 

21 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

manner, the value of land in Schleswig- 
Holstein would be increased by the annexa- 
tion of those provinces to such an active and 
progressive nation as Prussia. 

Mr. Gladstone went on to talk of his own 
somewhat romantic mission to Greece. He 
appeared to think that the old Greek type 
of countenance still lingered in Continental 
Greece more than is commonly supposed. 
I reminded him of the statement quoted by 
Gibbon from a Byzantine historian that " all 
Greece has been slavonised and become 
barbarous." " Yes," replied Mr. Gladstone, 
" I remember the passage well ; and does not 
Gibbon go on to say that the language is as 
barbarous as the idea?" I have thought 
this worth recording as serving to show that, 
little as he sympathised with Gibbon, he yet 
knew Gibbon's History well. 

He told Mr. Mill that he had never wit- 
nessed such complete and contented idleness 
as at Corfu. He related that he had there 
seen three men leisurely occupied in driving 
two turkeys along the road. Before pro- 
nouncing a judgment on this queer otium 
sine dignitate, one would wish to know what 
were its antecedent conditions, and how far 
the instance was a typical one. 

22 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I well remember a long walk which I took 
with Mr. Gladstone one Sunday afternoon 
at Hawarden. In the course of it, I referred 
to Mill's contention that slave-grown cotton 
was exhausting the soil of the Southern 
States, and that, even from a purely com- 
mercial point of view, emancipation was 
likely to be a gain ; was Mr. Gladstone of 
the same opinion? He replied that he ab- 
horred slavery, but that he nevertheless 
feared that abolition would, in the first in- 
stance at any rate, be attended with financial 
difificulties. 

I went on to ask him how he explained 
the strong antipathy expressed by nearly all 
Anglo-Americans for coloured men. The 
repulsion thus inspired by the typical negro 
is commonly described as physical and as 
irremediable, being, in fact, of the nature 
indicated by Sydney Smith in his famous 
adaptation of Virgil — 

" Et, si non alium late jactaret odorem, 
Civis erat." 

Macaulay had said in conversation that, 
in his opinion, there was much exaggeration 
in this and kindred statements ; he found it 
hard to reconcile them with the very close 

23 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

personal relation which not unfrequently 
subsists between individuals of the two 
races. Did not Mr. Gladstone also think 
that the antipathy in question is, in great 
part, born of imagination? His answer was 
decidedly in the affirmative. In support of 
his opinion, he mentioned the case (to which 
I shall have occasion to revert further on) of 
a negro gentleman whom he had himself 
known, and who was, not merely agreeable 
and accomplished, but distinguished by the 
refinement of his manners. 

We fell to talking about physiognomy. 
He gave me the impression of more or less 
agreeing with Duncan, that there is no art 
to find the mind's construction in the face. 
In defence of his view, he cited the example 
of a distinguished politician who was then 
in the House of Commons, and who had 
been one of the pioneers of Free Trade: ** I 
detest his countenance; but I believe that a 
more upright and honourable man never 
lived." There was something "Intense" 
in Mr. Gladstone's voice as he said this, 
which was typical of his mode of conversing. 
His talk was not rhetorical; but it was em- 
phatically the talk of an orator. In other 
words, it was not through rounded sen- 

24 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

tences, nor through a spouting, and, so to 
say, rounding delivery, but through the 
frequent use of strong phrases vocally itali- 
cised, and perhaps I should add, through the 
not infrequent accumulation of nearly syn- 
onymous epithets where perhaps a single 
epithet would have sufificed, that the note 
of the orator was discernible in his discourse. 
It was, if my memory serves me, on the 
evening of the same Sunday that Mr. Glad- 
stone conversed with me about the Classics 
and likewise about Theology. I asked some 
questions about the Homeric poems; and 
when I presently expressed a fear that I was 
boring him, he very graciously cut short my 
apology by saying that, after all the tumult 
and bustle of politics, he felt himself ** in 
heaven ' ' when he was breathing the pure 
atmosphere of Homer. He appeared to 
me, I confess, less to advantage when he 
passed into the region of Theology. I was 
so audacious as to make some strictures on 
the character of David. Were the vindictive 
and perfidious injunctions given by the dying 
king to his successor easily reconciled with 
his claim to be accounted a man after God's 
own heart? During this part of our conver- 
sation the late Lord Lyttelton was present, 

25 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and made the very natural remark that this 
was an old crux, but that he thought the 
difficulty could be got over. What surprised 
me about Mr. Gladstone was that, in this 
part of the discussion, he seemed to be tread- 
ing on new ground. Perhaps his mind was 
preoccupied, or I may have failed to under- 
stand him ; but he certainly seemed to me 
to speak as if he was puzzled to make out 
what I meant, and as if this whole class of 
objections had never crossed his mind. 

Our controversy on Old Testament ethics 
was merely an episode in a friendly discus- 
sion on one of Mr. Gladstone's favourite 
topics. He said that he had one fault to 
find with the Oxford Liberals which he could 
never get over : they made such small ac- 
count of Bishop Butler. I did my best to 
clear up the anomaly which so embarrassed 
and pained him ; but the solution which I 
offered did not satisfy him. As I shall have 
occasion to revert to this subject, it may 
obviate the necessity of further explanation 
if I state, more explicitly than I ventured to 
state to Mr. Gladstone, the causes which 
excite in some Oxford Liberals so strong an 
antipathy to what he called the ** Butlerian " 
system. It must be premised that many of 

26 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

those Liberals regard Butler as a less logical 
Mansel; insomuch that Hansel's Bampton 
Lectures may be described as Butler's 
Analogy writ plain. Now, Oxford Liberals 
of the- class indicated by Mr. Gladstone 
generally sympathise with what may be 
termed the Left Centre of Theology, and 
perhaps, next to that, with the Right 
Centre. On the other hand, Butler's and 
Hansel's reasoning is a weapon which the 
Extreme Right and the Extreme Left com- 
bine to use against the Right Centre and the 
Left Centre, but which they are powerless 
to employ against one another. Nay, we 
may go the length of saying that the weapon 
which Catholics employ with such deadly 
effect against the orthodox Protestant is the 
self-same Butlerian weapon wherewith he 
himself is wont, so confidently and so piti- 
lessly, to transfix all Liberal Protestants — 

" The treacherous instrument is in thy hand, 
Unbated and envenomed." 

Nor is this all. The argument of the 
Analogy, if pressed to its conclusions, would 
interdict the application of our human stand- 
ard of ethics to any alleged divine revela- 
tion, and would consequently yield every- 

27 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

thing to the faith which, if the phrase may 
be allowed, bids highest in miracles. lonce 
heard Jowett make the admission that, on 
that principle, a strong case might be made 
out for Brahminism. At all events, without 
presuming to award the thaumaturgical palm, 
his disciples are dismayed when they reflect 
with what ease and with what fatal results 
the too accommodating and transferable, or, 
as Bunyan might have said, facing both ways, 
logic of Butler could be turned to account 
by the enemies of religion. For, as viewed 
from the standpoint of those enemies, the 
argument of Butler and Mansel amounts to 
this, " If we are not prepared to believe 
everything, we must believe nothing. Gar- 
de z-vous de ce premier pas qui coHte. Give 
Supernaturalism an inch, and it claims the 
Universe." 

And now, before proceeding to my later 
and longer conversations with Mr. Glad- 
stone, I propose to make one or two of 
those illustrative comments of which I have 
already spoken. With this object in view, 
it will be convenient to go back a little. 
When preparing myself for my first visit to 
Hawarden, I had a talk with an able man 
whose name I will not disclose, but of whom 

28 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I will say that he knew Mr. Gladstone well ; 
and I asked him (in effect) so to furbish me 
up intellectually that I might not be wholly 
unpresentable when brought face to face with 
the great man. Especially did I wish to 
know whether it would be safe to express 
modern views in his presence. What has 
already been related may be taken as in 
some sort answering this question. Never- 
theless, it may be of use to report the an- 
swer, or rather the general account of Mr. 
Gladstone, which my experienced informant 
gave me. He advised me to beware, during 
my stay at Hawarden, of expressing heretical 
opinions before my orthodox host. Mr. 
Gladstone, he went on to say, was distin- 
guished by two great qualities, each of which 
he possessed in an extraordinary degree, 
and the combination of which he possessed 
in a degree almost, if not quite, unprece- 
dented. These qualities were, first, the 
oratorical faculty, and, secondly, the power 
of mastering details. But the oratorical 
faculty has its drawbacks. Being so strongly 
developed in Mr. Gladstone, it generated in 
him an abnormal, if not morbid, intensity 
of purpose. Whatsoever his mind or his 
head found to do, he did it with his might. 

29 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

The result was that his intellect grew to be 
like the giant oak, wanting in pliancy by- 
reason of its massive strength. His difficulty 
in sympathising with opponents was meas- 
ured by his unfaltering conviction — a convic- 
tion as intense as that of St. Paul or of 
Savonarola — that his own cause was the 
cause of God. My friend concluded by tell- 
ing me that the great orator's eager and, as 
it were, hypnotic absorption in whatever he 
took up was sometimes apparent even in 
trivial matters, and that at such times it 
was apt to become extravagant, and even 
oppressive: " He will talk about a piece of 
old china as if he was standing before the 
judgment-seat of God." 

" I have," said Charles Lamb, ** an almost 
feminine partiality for old china." Prob- 
ably this predilection was the only point 
which Lamb and Mr. Gladstone had in com- 
mon. And, even in that point of resem- 
blance, there was a marked difference be- 
tween the two men. For, in the case of 
Mr. Gladstone, this " feminine partiality," 
as it were, put on virility through its contact 
with his eminently masculine nature. How 
quixotic, or rather how Quixote-like, how 
grandly fantastic he was in that infatuation, 

30 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

even as in his infatuation about Helen of 
Troy ! I never ceased to be grateful to the 
late Lady de Tabley who, one evening when 
she and I were guests of the Gladstones, 
espied me nescio quid meditantem nugarum 
in a distant corner, and hurried me across 
the room just in time to see Mr. Gladstone 
holding up a piece of old china, and to take 
note of the flashing eye and the Rhadaman- 
thine solemnity with which the great enthu- 
siast was winding up his discourse. 

Passing on to a less quaintly trivial mat- 
ter, I will add another example of the way 
in which Mr. Gladstone, in what may be 
termed his intellectual paintings, was apt to 
lay on the colours too thick. A distinguished 
Liberal told me, many years ago, that he 
had asked Mr. Gladstone if he did not think 
it a matter of regret that the young men of 
the time seemed to take little interest in the 
debates in the House of Commons. Mr. 
Gladstone laid his hand on my friend's arm, 
and explained with awe-inspiring emphasis 
that the indifference thus shown by the 
rising generation appeared to him to be a 
** plague-spot " in the body politic. My 
informant, though himself a very earnest 
man, evidently thought that Mr. Gladstone, 

31 



Talks With Mr, Gladstone 

by his vehement and, so to say, Apocalyptic 
use of language, showed a certain want of 
moral perspective* 

It will now be understood what Walter 
Bagehot meant by saying of him : — 

" He is interested in everything he has to do with, 
and often interested too much. He proposes to put 
a stamp on contract notes with an eager earnestness 
as if the destiny of Europe here and hereafter de- 
pended upon its enactment. . . . The oratorical 
impulse is a disorganising impulse. The higher 
faculties of the mind require a certain calm, and the 
excitement of oratory is unfavourable to that calm." 

The latter part of this extract may seem 
irrelevant ; but I quote it as leading up to 
a matter on which I wish to touch briefly. 
I had a talk with Jowett about Mr. Glad- 
stone some forty years ago, that is to say, 
before he had begun to entertain the antip- 
athy for him which he freely expressed in 
later years. What, I asked, did he make 
of the fact that this most religious of our 
politicians was often charged with being 
dishonest ? His answer was on this wise: 
** Gladstone is not dishonest; but it is nat- 
ural that persons who do not understand 
him should think him dishonest." He went 
on to make some explanatory and other 

32 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

general remarks ; but the only one of those 
remarks that I can distinctly recall is, that 
he expressed a better opinion of Mr. Glad- 
stone than of Bishop Wilberforce. His 
explanation, however, left certain vague 
impressions on my mind ; and I have often 
felt a wish, as an architect might say, to 
restore that explanation, or rather to give 
shape to the general impression which I my- 
self have derived from this and from more 
direct sources. How came it about, let me 
repeat, that this conspicuously upright and 
conscientious statesman was so grievously 
misunderstood? Such a misunderstanding, 
if not accounted for as founded on some 
plausible error, is thought to warrant the 
suspicion of being founded on fact; and 
therefore, without pretending wholly to 
clear up the misconstruction under which 
Mr. Gladstone laboured, I feel bound, after 
enjoying the privilege of his friendship, to 
throw out one or two explanatory sugges- 
tions. 

Let me, then, begin by observing that the 
faults of a great and good man always stand 
out conspicuously in relief. Not only are 
they conspicuous because he is conspicuous, 
and because they are seen in broad contrast 
3 33 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

to his virtues, but also because the high 
ideal which he sets up is a standing rebuke 
to the self-complacent mediocrity of his 
neighbours, and tempts them to indemnify 
themselves by means of reprisals ; insomuch 
that to the saint or hero as well as to the 
Pharisee — to him who, holding high and, as 
it were, reproachful ideals, strives to act up 
to them, as well as to him who does not — 
should the Divine caution be addressed : 
** With what measure ye mete it shall be 
measured to you again." Mr. Gladstone, 
in particular, stood in need of this caution. 
Being an orator, he was wont to think and 
to speak with his emotions at red heat, and 
to give utterance to burning and provocative 
words when he passed censure on folly and 
sin. Also, he laid himself open to attack by 
his political change of front. No doubt this 
transition of his, in an age of transition, was 
in a sense appropriate, and furnished one of 
the many proofs of his conscientiousness. 
** To live is to change," says Newman, 
** and to be perfect is to have changed 
often." There is some truth in this obser- 
vation, though it is too broadly expressed, 
and though it comes oddly from an upholder 
of the most unbending of creeds. But, at 

34 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

any rate, to rank changefulness of this kind 
as a virtue is to set up a counsel of imper- 
fection. " Unstable as water," says the 
Scripture, "thou shalt not excel"; and 
assuredly the man of many changes, the 
sort of man whom Aristotle would have 
called a chameleon, cannot hope to inspire 
confidence. He is liable to excite an appre- 
hension that (if I may so express myself) he 
may one day become a re-turncoat^ or else 
may be, not a turncoat only, but a turn 
waistcoat as well; in other words, he may 
either go back, or else go forward too fast 
and too far. Thus it was that, being at 
once an orator and (in the literal sense) a 
renegade, Mr. Gladstone was severely han- 
dled, and ran the risk of being overwhelmed 
by a flood of invectives. In fear of such 
submersion, he caught at straws, and per- 
suaded himself that they were solid planks. 
To lay aside metaphor, he was subtle and 
even sophistical in his explanations of his 
devious courses. Yet in giving these ex- 
planations he was perfectly sincere. 

Sincerity under these conditions would 
have been impossible to a philosopher; but 
it came easily to such a typical orator as 
Mr. Gladstone. For the typical orator, in 

35 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

whom, as in women, feeling is believing, 
resembles women likewise in their perilously 
convenient capacity for self-deception. But 
the hallucinations of the orator, those veri- 
table eidola fori, are just what Philistines 
cannot, and political opponents will not, 
understand. Nor can it be denied that on 
that ground the opponents of Mr. Gladstone 
could build up a plausible case. Thus, when 
Disraeli said of him that ** he was inebriated 
with the exuberance of his ov/n verbosity," 
it must be admitted that in that eminently 
Disraelitish phrase — itself not conspicuous 
for the simplicity of its diction — there was 
the element of truth that Mr. Gladstone 
was sometimes not the master but the ser- 
vant of his emotions, and even of his meta- 
phors. The result of all this was that, in 
the popular imagination, his subtlety of 
reasoning came to be associated with that 
moral indirectness which the word subtlety 
often connotes. Indeed, his unconscious 
special pleading was at last mistaken for 
deliberate insincerity. Hence it appears 
that the dishonesty of which he has often 
been accused, resolves itself into the seem- 
ing dishonesty of an orator who is also a 
man of action, or (let us say) of a statesman 

36 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

who often unwittingly has recourse to com- 
promises such as he has often eloquently 
denounced ; it is, in fact, dishonesty simulated 
by impassioned honesty. For, in very truth, 
a saintly enthusiast, seeking to practise all 
that he has preached, is trying to maintain 
himself on a level too high for human nature 
{ceratis ope Daedalea Nititur pennis). ^ 

With this intensity^ born of oratorical 
sensibility, was closely connected another 
aspect of Mr. Gladstone's mind, which must 
be mentioned as throwing light on certain 
parts of his conversations with me. He was 
not affected or afflicted with that need of 
laughing to prevent weeping, with that 
mingled sense of world-humour and of world- 
pathos — in short, with that appetite for the 
incongruous — which is a characteristic prod- 
uct of decadence, and which, like a fair 

' The difficulty of keeping aloft, during a long period, 
at the enthusiastically moral, or rather at the apostolic, 
level is set forth by Renan forcibly, though doubtless with 
some exaggeration. Referring to the protracted and 
checquered career of Mahomet, and apparently making at 
the same time an indirect allusion to the early death of 
One greater than Mahomet, he observes : " L'homme est 
trop faible pour porter longtemps la mission divine, et 
ceux-14 seuls sont immacules que Dieu a bientot decharges 
du fardeau de I'apostolat." 

37 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

plant springing up from a manured soil, 
derives much of its sustenance from the 
noisome tragedies of life. Indeed, he had 
no toleration — I had almost said no compre- 
hension — of that Epicurean and, so to say, 
Renanesque quality which French writers 
call * ' ironie ' ' and Bagehot has called * ' pleas- 
ant cynicism." Perhaps I should be merely 
expressing the same thought in other words 
if I were to say that, himself demanding 
much from human nature, he had no sym- 
pathy or patience with those who demanded 
little from it. In short, he would not, like 
Pope, have declared the ** ninth beatitude " 
to be " Blessed is he who expects nothing, 
for he shall never be disappointed. ' * Rather 
would he have agreed with Kingsley in call- 
ing that a " devil's beatitude." It is not 
necessary to dwell further on this side of Mr. 
Gladstone's character. Suffice it to say that 
his rooted aversion to cynicism and scepti- 
cism of all sorts may serve to explain the tone 
of some of his observations recorded in the 
sequel. Especially may it account for the 
severity with which he spoke to me of Talley- 
rand, and even of Matthew Arnold, and for 
his earnest exhortation to keep alive the 
sense of sin. 

38 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Dean Swift, hearing someone described as 
** a fine old man," petulantly exclaimed: 
** A fine old man? There is no such thing. 
If the man you speak of had either a mind 
or a body worth a farthing, they would have 
worn him out long ago." Could such an 
inhuman outcry of despair have proceeded 
from anyone who had known our wise orator 
and statesman when the mellowing hand of 
time had passed upon him, and who had 
felt, when the news came that he too had 
gone to his rest in the eternal, how sad was 
the loss, not to his friends only, but to his 
country? 

Personally, I have often thought that the 
noble, if somewhat invidious, tribute of 
praise which was originally bestowed on 
Tiresias, and which Cato applied to the 
younger Scipio, could be transferred to 
the veteran Gladstone — 

'''OiG? TCETCvvdOaz, roi 8e duiai diddovdivj^^ 

For truly in this estimable but mediocre 
generation of ours — this generation so pro- 
lific of talent, but so barren of genius — he 

* Translated in North's Plutarch — 
" This only man right wise reputed is to be ; 
All other seem but shadows set, by such wise men as he." 

39 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

stood forth, during the closing years of his 
life, as a monumental relic of a mightier age 
which has passed away. To those closing 
years I now transport my readers. Our 
scene is transferred from England to Biarritz, 
at the same time that our drama (after the 
manner of the Winter s Tale) overleaps a 
score of years. Let me add that hencefor- 
ward the report of the dialogues will be in a 
quasi-dramatic, or, to speak more exactly, 
in a Boswellian and diaristic form. 



40 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 
1891-1896 



II 



" Sideris instar 
Emicuit Stilichonis apex, et cognita fulsit 
Canities." 

Claudian. 

{Paraphrased) 

" A Grand Old Man." 

H6tel d'Angleterre, Biarritz. 

December 1891. — Mr. Gladstone called on 
us. He complained that Butler is not cared 
for on the Continent. Kant had been in- 
fluenced by him, and acknowledged it; 
Lotze also spoke in high terms of him. 
Mr. Gladstone was slow in seeing what I 
meant when I said that the argument of 
Butler's Analogy is many-sided: that, if it 
disables human reason from dealing with the 
moral anomalies of one religion, it gives 
the like negative support to all religions; 
and that, in fact, it may as easily be used 
in defence of the massacre of St. Bartholo- 
mew, and even of Thuggee, as in defence of 

43 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Joshua's massacres and Jael's treachery. 
He said that he did not remember that 
Butler referred to these, but afterwards 
admitted that his argument might be so 
applied. I said that Catholics might think 
that Butler's argument told more for them 
than for us. He hardly seemed to see my 
point, but said that Catholicism seemed to 
be the only subject on which Butler lost his 
usual impartiality and became violent. He 
said that Lotze and others valued Butler 
mainly as a theologian; he himself valued 
him even more as a philosopher; he called 
him ''the guide through the perplexities of 
thought and conduct in modern life." On 
the side of the importance of Butler, unwill- 
ing testimony, he said, was given by Mark 
Pattison: ** The pains that he took to de- 
throne my idol are significant." He also 
quoted Miss Hennell, who wrote a pamphlet 
called On the Sceptical Tendencies of Butler s 
^^ Analogy'' He thought that this pamphlet 
had not received the attention it deserved. 
Miss Hennell, while attacking Butler, ex- 
presses her strong admiration for him. He 
thought that the neglect of Butler was a 
blot upon Oxford. 

He said that his only complaint against 
44 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Biarritz was that the society was too exclu- 
sively English. On my saying that I chiefly 
complained of its want of intellectuality, he 
went off on the subject of the great intel- 
lectual progress made by women. He had 
written an article in the Speaker on the great 
number of poetesses who were scarcely 
known as they deserved to be. He spoke 
of Mrs. Browning as the only exception. 
I referred to George Eliot; but he would 
not admit her claim. He mentioned Miss 
Constance Naden, Emily Bronte, Lady 
Charlotte Eliot, and Mrs. Clive, the author- 
ess of " X Poems by V." He referred 
especially to her poem on " Invitations to 
the Queen's Ball," as dealing with an un- 
promising subject, but showing powerful 
imagination. He had talked on the subject 
of these overlooked poetesses with Tenny- 
son, who agreed with him. 

Referring to Charles Austin, he spoke 
with disappointment of his having done so 
little in after life. I asked whether he did 
not think that men, not very strong phys- 
ically, sometimes overstrained themselves 
when young, and that then, like the flower- 
ing aloe, they were completely exhausted. 
He admitted this, and added that a career 

45 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

like that of Charles Austin was especially 
open to objection, as withdrawing very able 
men from leaving anything of permanent 
value. ^ I asked whether he was referring 
to the Bar in general or to the Parliamentary 
Bar in particular. He replied that he meant 
the latter, and instanced Hope Scott. 

I accompanied him to the Grand Hotel, 
where he was staying. He characteristically 
remarked that this hotel has seven gates, 
and that he called it inrocTtvXoi Qijfiai. 

Dece^nber 23, 1891. — I dined Avith Mr. 
Armitstead and the Gladstones. Mr. Glad- 
stone said that the science of " pre-history " 
is quite new ; and he went on to remark that 
the Basques pay greater respect to women 
now than anyone in Europe paid to them 
in the Middle Ages. 

He spoke of the English literature of the 
nineteenth century as " quite extraordi- 
nary." He thought this strange, ** because 
of the EHzabethan outburst." He said that 
there had been practically continuity, and 

* When commenting on my Recollections of Charles A us- 
tin, Fitzjames Stephen applied to Austin's ineffectual life 
the lament of Carlyle : "Oh, the Bar, the Bar ! I look on 
it as just a great devouring gulf that eats up all the sturdy 
fellows that might help us in our sorrows." 

46 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

that this was very rare, and was, moreover, 
a great disadvantage to living poets. No 
book nowadays produces an excitement at 
all equal to that caused by Walter Scott's 
novels. The nearest approach was the inter- 
est shown in Tennyson's last poems; but 
this was not at all equal to the interest awak- 
ened by Scott. 

A young lady present sprung a mine by 
saying that Scott was dull, and adding that 
she got more pleasure from Thackeray and 
George Eliot. She was more flattered than 
provoked by the half angry earnestness with 
which Mr. Gladstone said, " We shall never 
agree about novels." The young lady then 
said that she would recognise Maggie Tulliver 
if she spoke to her, but that she would not 
recognise one of Scott's heroines. Scott's 
queens seemed to her, like a child's notions 
of a queen, and to have nothing distinctive. 
" What, does he make no difference between 
Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth?" he 
asked indignantly. She inquired what mod- 
ern novels he admired. He replied by call- 
ing Mr. Baring Gould's Mahalah a very 
powerful novel; but he seemed to think 
that novels are now too much the rage. He 
spoke of the late Lord de Tabley as having 

47 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

written good poetry which is not read, and 
bad novels which are read. 

We went on to discuss the general ques- 
tion of how far Scott's heroes and heroines 
are lifelike. It seemed to me that this ques- 
tion could be illustrated by referring to the 
more extreme case of epic and tragic heroes. 
For example, the Homeric ^neas, after 
challenging Achilles, inflicted on him a 
somewhat irrelevant versified discourse; and 
(stranger still) the great Achilles, although 
in a hurry to kill as many Trojans as pos- 
sible, listened patiently to his enemy's tedi- 
ous harangue, instead of vanquishing him at 
once. So, likewise, Shakespeare represents 
Prince Arthur, after taking his fatal leap 
from the Tower, as breathing out his soul 
in a rhyming couplet. In view of such in- 
stances of untimely versification, one was 
tempted jocularly to say that the heroes of 
poetry combined the eccentricities of mos- 
quitoes and of swans : they sing before they 
'molest, and they sing before they die ! Seri- 
ously, if those inopportunely poetical heroes 
are called natural and lifelike, what poetical 
heroes can be called unnatural? Do not 
these considerations apply literally to the 
heroes of Scott's poems? and do not similar 

48 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

considerations apply, though of course in a 
far less degree, to the somewhat rhetorical 
and tall-talking heroes and heroines of 
Scott's novels? 

Mr. Gladstone's reply was, in effect, that 
Scott's writings are in " the grand style." 
He compared them to the paintings of 
Raphael and of the Old Masters generally; 
and he went on to say that the pictures of 
the Royal Academy recall more exactly the 
men and women in modern novels and life. 
He added that you have no right to like a 
book better because you are in sympathy 
with it ; on that principle, you would prefer 
the Royal Academy to the National Gallery. 
He might have gone a step further. " I 
know nothing of painting, and detest it," 
writes Byron, " unless it reminds me of 
something I have seen or think it possible 
to see." Probably the great majority of the 
persons who saunter through picture galleries 
would, if they had Bryon's candour, avow 
that they share his sentiments. These for- 
malists and art-pretenders, while they feel 
bound (as the phrase is) to ** do " the Na- 
tional Gallery, really derive more pleasure 
from the Royal Academy; and, mutatis 
mutandis^ they correspond to the startlingly 
4 49 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

large class of readers who prefer novels 
descriptive of common life to the novels of 
Scott. 

Mr. Gladstone was evidently not well up 
in Browning; but he said that it was plain 
that Browning must be a remarkable man: 
he had got hold of the reading public; the 
existence of Browning Societies showed how 
much trouble people would take to learn 
the "grammar" of his language. Passing 
on to Mr. George Meredith, he said that one 
of his daughters had made him begin Diana 
of the Crossways ; but he evidently stuck 
in it. 

He thought that Scott was the greatest 
delineator of human character next to Homer 
and Shakespeare. He remarked that in 
Italy there had been a revival of poetry in 
Leopardi and others. 

He maintained that there was a want of 
" harmony " in George Eliot's novels: " she 
makes such absurd people marry one an- 
other. Why did Adam Bede marry Dinah ? ' * 
Is it, one cannot but ask, an objection to a 
novel that it makes the wrong people marry? 
If it is, does not the objection apply as much 
to Kenilworth or The Bride of Lammermoor 
as to Adam Bede? Surely in all such cases 

50 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the novehst is simply realistic. He is seek- 
ing to embody in fiction the Horatian senti- 
ment which is only too often justified by 
experience — 

"Sic visum Veneri, cui placet impares 
Formas atque animos sub juga agnea 
Sasvo mittere cum joco." ^ 

After talking of American novelists and 
contrasting them with Scott, Mr. Gladstone 
said that an American had declared that he 
did not suppose that there were ten men in 
Boston equal to Shakespeare. This reminds 
me that I was once assured by an old Indian 
judge that he had himself heard a Baboo 
student ingenuously declare that he had 
been reading Shakespeare and Milton, and 
hoped soon to produce a poem which would 
combine the merits of both ! 

Mr. Gladstone went on to mention some 
curious ** survivals." In Yorkshire are two 
places, Boston and Appleton, called by 
people on the other side of a ridge Bosby 
and Appleby. In the same neighbourhood 
the same family was called indiscriminately 
** — ton" and*' — by." He regarded this as 

* " Thus it hath seemed good to Venus, who loveth with 
cruel jest unequally to yoke together forms and minds un- 
meet." 

51 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

a survival of an old state of things. He 
spoke of an odd tenure in land in the High- 
lands, the land not being held in common, 
but divided periodically, he thought annu- 
ally. 

Referring to a report in the newspapers 
that the Comte de Paris acquiesced in the 
Republic, he said he was glad of it. A 
few years ago especially, when there were 
so many claimants to the French throne, 
the conduct of those claimants was ** not 
mischievous merely, but ridiculous." He 
thought that the Franco-German War was 
almost entirely the act of the Emperor. 
The heads of departments had been asked 
about the general feeling in their own dis- 
tricts, and had in almost each instance an- 
swered that it was unfavourable to war; and 
even in the exceptional instances the feeling 
for war was described as lukewarm. One of 
the guests rejoined that he himself had been 
in Paris when the war was declared, and that 
then the feeling for it seemed to be very 
strong. Mr. Gladstone replied that Paris 
no doubt was more warlike than the prov- 
inces, but that it was very easy for the Gov- 
ernment to excite a seeming enthusiasm. 
He referred to a caricature which appeared 

52 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

at the time, and which represented the 
words " Ferme jusqu* a la prise de Berlin " 
as written over the shop of a cobbler who 
had opposed the war. I asked about plM- 
scites. He replied: ** The plMscite was a 
mere imposture, an enemy to liberty. No 
alternative to the Empire was proposed; so 
that those who voted for the Empire were 
choosing between it and anarchy." 

I asked about the unpopularity of the 
Emperor Frederick and the Empress. He 
said that she tried too ostentatiously to 
Anglicise Germany; and that Frederick, 
during his three months, had not time to 
accustom the Germans to a complete change 
of policy. Mr. Gladstone knew from ex- 
perience how little can be done in three 
months. He added that the Germans have 
had no history of their own for a long time, 
and this makes them extra-sensitive about 
foreign innovations. Might not this argu- 
ment of his be turned the other way? Would 
not a nation with a satisfactory history have 
at least as good a cause to complain of im- 
ported institutions? 

I spoke of the unexpectedly friendly atti- 
tude which had recently been adopted by 
the young Emperor towards England. Mr. 

S3 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Gladstone seemed not over confident about 
this. I asked about the fall of Bismarck. 

Gladstone. — ** According to English no- 
tions, Bismarck was clearly wrong; he in- 
sisted on his subordinates not communicating 
with the Emperor, except through him." 

Tollemache. — " Would it make much dif- 
ference in England if this were done? " 

G. — " Immense; but I find it difficult to 
give the reason. The working of the English 
Cabinet can hardly be understood ab extra. 
It grew by degrees, and its history is unre- 
corded. The best account of it is in Morley's 
monograph on Sir Robert Walpole. " 

He explained that he did not mean that 
the subordinate Ministers could appeal to 
the Crown against the Prime Minister. If 
they differed from him, of course they would 
have to resign; but, in the ordinary dis- 
charge of their official duties, they could not 
be expected to submit all despatches to him. 
He said that in the Life of the Prince Consort 
a great exception is recorded. He thought 
that this occurred in 185 1. Lord John Rus- 
sell, then Prime Minister, insisted on seeing 
Lord Palmerston's despatches. Mr. Glad- 
stone regretted that he had never cross-ques- 
tioned Lord John about this. Lord John 

54 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

was well up in constitutional law and cus- 
tom ; and Mr. Gladstone supposed that he 
meant his conduct to be regarded as entirely- 
exceptional and pro re nata. I asked him 
what he thought of Lord Palmerston as a 
speaker. 

G, — ** He had a happy faculty of making 
his words exactly fit his meaning. This 
does not sound a very uncommon thing; 
but it really is so. People are apt to say 
more than they mean. Parnell is another 
striking instance of the same guardedness 
of expression." 

T, — ** My father was much struck by the 
speaking of Mr. Lowe." 

G. — " In 1866 Lowe was quite at the top 
of the tree." 

January 2nd, 1892. — Mr. and Mrs. Glad- 
stone dined with us. 

I said the old grace, Benedictus benedicat, 
and added that Charles Austin used always 
to say it. Mr, Gladstone remarked that it 
was adopted in the Nonconformist College 
at Oxford. He expressed great satisfaction 
at there being such a College, or rather two 
such; and he wished there was a Roman 
Catholic one. He said that Newman and 

55 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the more liberal Catholics wished for 
one. 

He regarded the reputed Editor of the 
Spectator (Mr. Hutton) as being, at least 
since Matthew Arnold's death, the first of 
our critics. Since his own policy had been 
each week attacked in the Spectator, he had 
left off taking it in. He said that this was 
due to his great regard for the Editor: " I 
found that reading those weekly attacks 
tended, to use a vulgar term, to establish a 
raw. 

I told the story that Matthew Arnold, 
when asked what he thought of Robert Els- 
mere J replied, ** No Arnold could ever write 
a novel. Otherwise / should have written 
one!" 

G. — ** I have been told that Arnold did 
not consider that Robert Elsmere went far 
enough." 

T. — " Arnold's theology, I should say, 
was more negative than Robert Elsmere's. 
But he clung to the Church as the symbol 
of his spiritual life ; he was less of a Theist, 
but more of a Christian. He was a Neo- 
Christian, or rather a Neo-Anglican.'* 

G. — " I understand that Matthew Arnold 
considered himself so far an Anglican so to 

56 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

take part in the discussions in Sion Col- 
lege." 

T. — " I know that he used to take the 
Sacrament." 

Being asked what he thought of Lord 
Rosebery's Life of Pitt, he said that he 
agreed with the first part of that work, but 
not with the second. He considered him- 
self a Pittite in regard to the first part of 
Pitt's career, but a Foxite in regard to the 
second part. 

I expressed some surprise at Lord Hol- 
land's having protested against Napoleon's 
being sent to St. Helena. 

G. — " I believe that Napoleon narrowly- 
escaped being shot, and I understand that 
Wellington was in favour of his execution- 
But I am glad that his life was spared." 

T. — ** I believe that this was also the wish 
of Bliicher. How was it that, if the two 
generals were thus agreed. Napoleon es- 
caped? " 

G. — " The Emperor of Austria was nat- 
urally opposed to the execution of his own 
son-in-law; and I believe that, in spite of 
all that Russia had suffered, the Czar was 
of the same mind." 

T. — ** Charles Austin would not have 
57 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

minded if Napoleon had been shot after 
Waterloo. The bloodshed after the return 
from Elba was more due to Napoleon than 
to Ney or Laboudoyere.'* 

G. — ** I amx not defending the execution 
of Ney. At the same time, I think that 
much might have been urged in favour 
of Austin's view. But the evils of the 
French Revolution, and even of the First 
Empire, should in great part be laid to 
the account of Louis XIV. and XV., and 
even of Richelieu. These destroyed the 
sense of duty and of public spirit among 
Frenchmen. The Terrorists were merely 
the funguses which sprung up in the cor- 
rupt soil.'* 

In regard to this reasoning I am tempted 
to object that, if it may be pleaded in excuse 
for Robespierre and Napoleon that their 
misdemeanours were in some sort the out- 
come of previous conditions, may not the 
same plea be urged on behalf of Richelieu 
and the Bourbons? In fact, the shield of 
Philosophical Necessity should be cast over 
everyone, or over no one. Especially should 
we bear in mind that the tyrannical acts of 
rulers bear some sort of relation to the 
passivity of the masses. The guilt of Pha- 

58 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

laris, when he roasted shipwrecked mariners 
alive in his sonorous bull, was to some degree 
shared by his subjects, who tolerated, if they 
did not enjoy, the pastime of the vjuros 
aviAvoGv, of the hideous melody of murder. 
A less extreme example of the solidarity 
that subsists between rulers and ruled is well 
indicated by Cassius in Julius Ccesar — 

" And why should Caesar be a tyrant then ? 
Poor man ! I know he would not be a wolf, 
But that he sees the Romans are but sheep : 
He were no lion, were not the Romans hinds." 

G. — " Napoleon at St. Helena used to 
protest against being compared with Crom- 
well ; he used to say that he had not cut off 
his king's head, but had merely appeared 
as the Saviour of Society. Well, it was the 
Allied Powers, and especially the English, 
who, by making war on the French, frus- 
trated every attempt of the Republic to set 
up a durable Government. And in the 
meantime the English labourer was impover- 
ished. In 1 812 he was ten times worse off 
than he now is. He received only half his 
present wages, and he had to pay five times 
as much for bread. At one time corn rose 
to 21S. a bushel; while now, or at least dur- 

59 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

ing the past few years, and until quite lately, 
he had only to pay 4s. a bushel." 

Mr. Gladstone urged me to read the 
Memoirs of Marbot, who had unusual oppor- 
tunities of seeing Napoleon at close quarters. 
He admitted, indeed, that Marbot some- 
times drew the long-bow, as when he de- 
scribed himself as more than a match for 
three Englishmen. I compared this with 
the complete victory won by three French- 
men over three Englishmen in Les trots 
Moiisquetaires. Mr. Gladstone more appro- 
priately contrasted it with the assertion in 
Henry F., that one Englishman is a match 
for three Frenchmen. Charles Kean had 
told him that, before Magenta and Solferino, 
the gallery always clapped this passage. 
After those French victories the clapping 
ceased. Mr. Gladstone quoted this as speak- 
ing well for the good sense and fairness of 
the English people. 

Is there anything to be urged on the oppo- 
site side of the question? At any rate, I 
am tempted to supplement Mr. Gladstone's 
view by quoting, for what it is worth, an 
extract from one of Chesterfield's Letters: 
** That silly, sanguine notion, which is firmly 
entertained here, that one Englishman can 

60 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

beat three Frenchmen, encourages, and has 
sometimes enabled,one Englishman in reality 

to beat two." 

The conversation passed on to English 
politics and lawyers. 

J, " My uncle, Lord Mount Temple, used 

to tell me that lawyers generally fail in Parlia- 
ment. Was not Cockburn an exception? " 

G,— ' Cockburn 's reputation in Parlia- 
ment was founded on a single speech, in 
defence of Lord Palmerston. Take the case 
of another great lawyer. Sir George Jessel 
discussed legal questions with beautiful clear- 
ness, but became a mere partizan when dis- 
cussing politics." 

7; *♦ Lord Lansdowne once told Charles 

Austin that he thought Bright, as an orator, 
fully equal to Charles Fox." This seemed 
to surprise Mr. Gladstone. I referred to 
Sheridan's" Begum Speech " as having been 

ill reported. 

Q^ ♦* The speeches in Parliament are ill 

reported even now. Questions asked before 
debate are accurately given ; but, as for the 
rest, I can only apply to the reports what 
Kingsley said to the friend who consulted 
him about his poems, ' They are not good, 
but bad. ' This is creditable to the reporters 

61 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

as men." He apparently meant that the 
reporters thus show that they take a human 
interest in what they hear and write. 

G. — " The very same reporters would do 
their work much better in the country. It 
takes me twice as long to correct a speech 
in Parliament as to correct one of equal 
length in the country." He even com- 
plained of the accuracy of the reports of 
speeches in the Times; but other M.P. *s 
have spoken to me far more favourably of 
these reports in the Times. They think 
that Mr. Gladstone's difficulty in getting 
his speeches well reported, arose from the 
fact that at this time of his life he had, 
except when strongly excited, lost somewhat 
of his clear articulation. 

G. — " Canning's speeches, as published in 
their collected form, are very different from 
what they were as originally reported." 

I asked him if he had heard Canning's 
famous speech which was delivered in 1826, 
when the independence of the Spanish Colo- 
nies in the West was acknowledged by Great 
Britain, and which contained the exultant 
phrase, " I called the New World into ex- 
istence to redress the balance of the Old." 

G, — ** No. I did not hear that speech; 
62 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

but I heard two earlier ones. One was at 
Liverpool in 1822. It was called the * Red 
Lion ' speech. In this speech Canning satir- 
ised those who made reform a panacea, by 
comparing them to the painter who could 
paint nothing but red lions. In boudoirs 
small red lions were painted, in drawing- 
rooms bigger ones. Personally, I feel some 
sympathy with the people thus satirised. 
Another speech of Canning which I heard, 
contained a prediction of the future great- 
ness of Lord John Russell ; it was (in effect): 
* I doubt not that the noble lord will become 
great, and that his principles will triumph ; 
but, for myself, I am proud to be on the 
losing side.' " 

I quoted Victrix causa dels placuit, sed 
victa Catoni, and might more appropriately 
have quoted the exclamation of Brutus after 
the battle of Philippi — 

" I shall have glory by this losing day. 
More than Octavius and Mark Antony 
By this vile conquest shall attain unto."^ 

^ I am sorry that I did not repeat, in this relation, the 
lines from Addison's Cato, which Mr. Gladstone's hero, 
Sir Walter Scott, when taking up ineffectual arms against 
a sea of troubles, manfully applied to himself — 
" 'Tis not in mortals to command success, 
But we'll do more, Sempronius, we'll deserve it." 

63 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Mr. Gladstone spoke of Bethel and New- 
man as the two most subtle masters of Eng- 
lish prose of our time. He said that, in 
the affair of Sir John Bowring, the Govern- 
ment consulted its law officers as to Sir 
John's conduct towards China. Wortley, 
the Solicitor-General, seemed to think the 
case doubtful; but Bethel declared that Sir 
John had not a leg to stand upon. After- 
wards he was called upon in Parliament to 
defend the Government, and so acute an 
observer as Sir Erskine May expressed an 
opinion that he had made out a strong case. 

I remarked that the view taken of Lord 
Lyndhurst by Miss Martineau and Walter 
Bagehot was anything but flattering; and I 
mentioned the incident which was afterwards 
recorded in my article called ** Lord Tolle- 
mache and his Anecdotes." ** Charles Aus- 
tin related a fact illustrative of the bitter 
indignation which prevailed among the 
Whigs when Copley, like another Strafford, 
suddenly * ratted ' and turned Tory. So 
extreme was this resentment that Denman 
told his servant that, if his old friend called, 
he was not to be admitted. In spite of the 
servant, the future Lord Lyndhurst made 
his way to the door of Denman's chambers, 

64 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and shouted from outside, * Let me at least 
beg that, if you are asked about my change 
of opinions, you will say that it was honest.' 
* If I am asked about your change of opin- 
ions,' was the reply from within, * I will say 
that you say it was honest. ' " ^ 

Mr. Gladstone cautiously replied that Lord 
Lyndhurst was something of a statesman, 
and that he understood that his legal deci- 
sions carried weight. 

T.— ' My father told me that he had 
heard Peel speak with high praise of what 
he termed Cobden's * unadorned elo- 
quence. ' ^ I only once heard Cobden speak, 
and he seemed to me then to be very want- 
ing in fluency; he could not hit upon the 
right word. But this was shortly before he 
died ; and my father afterwards told me that 
he had never before known him to be so 
unsuccessful." 

G, — ** I never knew Cobden pause for a 

^Fortnightly Review, July 1892, p. 74. 

' The classical reader will be reminded of the praise 
bestowed by Cicero on Caesar's eloquence, which he de- 
scribes as bare of all ornament, like an undraped human 
figure {tanquam veste detractd). I am tempted to quote 
in this place the actual words employed by Peel about 
Cobden's eloquence : " It is the more to be admired be- 
cause it is unaffected and unadorned." 
5 65 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

word ; it must have been most exceptional. 
But he was wanting in quickness of percep- 
tion. I remember his making a speech 
shortly before the Repeal of the Corn Laws ; 
and on that occasion Peel, who seldom be- 
stowed high praise, muttered, * This is ad- 
mirable.' But in this very speech Cobden 
went on to make use of a very unfortunate 
illustration: * My honourable friend, the 
member for Rochdale, manufactures long 
yarns at a low price ! ' " 

We talked about Bright ; and I mentioned 
that I had heard his very fine speech at the 
dinner given to Mr. Garrison after the conclu- 
sion of the American Civil War. Mr. Glad- 
stone rejoined that Bright approved of the 
American War, and seemingly of that war 
only. Bright had seen that, although the 
Northern States were not in the first instance 
consciously fighting against slavery, the 
practical result of the war would be to abol- 
ish slavery; and he had seen this when 
hardly anyone else did. 

T, — ** Do you suppose that the condition 
of the slaves was as bad as might be gath- 
ered from Uncle Tom' s Cabin f ' ' 

G. — ** So far as physical suffering is con- 
cerned, I think the picture is too darkly 

66 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

coloured, Mrs. Beecher Stowe has com- 
bined all the worst details which were re- 
ported in various quarters. I will not say 
that she was morally to blame for this ex- 
aggeration; it was probably necessary for 
artistic effect. But I hold the great evil of 
slavery to have been, not physical suffering, 
but moral debasement. It degrades God's 
human creatures below the hmnaji level, ** He 
also spoke of the bad effect on the masters, 
who were sinking lower and lower. I men- 
tioned Chief Justice Shea, U.S.A., as having 
told me that the negroes are now becoming 
more and more helpless. Mr. Gladstone, 
after earnestly recapitulating the chief evils 
of slavery, such as the separation of families, 
etc., said that there was no doubt that it 
furnished some beautiful examples of faith- 
ful devotion. He confirmed the Chief Jus- 
tice's opinion as to the present condition of 
the negroes, by the example of San Do- 
mingo, where they are reported (he believed 
on good authority) to be sinking into brutal 
idolatry, and even cannibalism. He said 
that evidence bearing in the same direction 
had been given him by a coloured President 
of the Liberian Republic. I reminded him 
that, twenty-eight years before, he had told 

67 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

me of some coloured man who had struck 
him, not merely by his intelligence, but also 
by his refined manners. He replied that 
this was probably the very man. He then 
suddenly looked startled, and exclaimed, 
" A formidable memory! " He went on to 
ask whether it was ** a naturally strong 
memory which had been hardened and stimu- 
lated by practice.*' I compared it to a 
strong current which is made stronger by 
being forced to run in a narrow channel. 
My eyesight, I explained, limits the range 
of my reading, and cuts me off from the 
newspapers, and from many sources of ob- 
servation. Thus my memory is concen- 
trated upon a few subjects. 

G. — ** Archbishop Benson remarked to me 
in conversation, that most men's memories 
are much impaired by the daily practice of 
reading the newspapers, and of skimming 
over a variety of unconnected subjects." 

I asked him whether it was true that he 
ascribed his own good health to the practice 
of masticating his food twenty times. He 
said that, when his children were young, he 
told them that, when eating, they should 
think of four bars of common time written 
in quavers; by which, as he explained to 

68 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

liiy unmusical ear, he meant that they were 
to bite each mouthful thirty-two times ; but 
he looked upon this as a counsel of perfec- 
tion. He ate very slowly. I was surprised 
by this, as he talked so much. Montaigne, 
who never reached old age, had to increase 
mastication when he had passed middle life, 
and found it a bar to talking. 

Mr. Gladstone added that he had other 
rules for the preservation of health. He 
felt the importance of Sunday rest. I asked, 
Did he get rest in listening to long sermons? 
He interrupted, "They are not often long 
now; but I do not like to hear more than 
one sermon which makes me think." He 
also found that a change of subjects was 
rest. He had acquired the power of keep- 
ing his mind off politics after he was in bed. 
When Bright was ill, he mentioned this to 
him. Bright rejoined, " This is just when 
I think of my speeches." He said that 
Bright's imprudence about health had been 
"abominable!" He thought that men of 
active minds and of a certain age would do 
well to consult some first-rate London doctor 
by way of taking preventive measures: " I 
do not say any doctor in particular; but let 
it be a first-rate one." I cross-questioned 

69 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

him further about Bright. He told me that 
Andrew Clarke, when Bright went to con- 
sult him, asked, ** To what do I owe the 
honour of seeing you?" Bright answered, 
" Mr. Gladstone made me come. He would 
give me no peace." After consulting An- 
drew Clarke, he had no more of his nervous 
attacks. Mr. Gladstone added that he him- 
self, under orders, had given up bitter beer, 
which he called a "divine drink" (deiov 
Ttorov). 

I asked about Dizzy, and quoted this 
phrase, once used by him about the Liberal 
leaders when their Government had been 
beaten : '* I see before me a range of extinct 
volcanoes." ^ 

G. — " Dizzy did not show at his best dur- 
ing the last twenty years of his life. But he 

* I reported this incident to Mr. Gladstone as it had been 
told to me by a living statesman, who, I understood, had 
been present. Hayward gives a different account of it. 
He quotes the following extract from a speech delivered 
by Disraeli at Manchester : " As I sat opposite the Treas- 
ury bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those 
marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South 
America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. 
Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situa- 
tion is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, 
and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea." Can 
Dizzy have used this metaphor twice ? 

70 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

showed great ability when attacking Peel. 
Mind, I am not weighing his sayings in the 
moral scales; but they certainly showed 
great ability." 

T, — ** I understand that Shell spoke of 
the falling off of Disraeli's eloquence after 
Feel's deaths and compared him to a dissect- 
ing surgeon without a corpse." 

G, — " I will give one or two examples of 
his witty attacks on Peel. Speaking of the 
Maynooth Grant, he said of Peel : * To what 
end is it that he thus convulses the country,^ 
That the Maynooth students may lie two in 
a bed instead of lying three in a bed.'^ I 
will not deny that Maynooth was pauperised. 
But I will pass on to another example: Dis- 
raeli charged Peel with tracing the steam- 
engine back to the tea-kettle ! " 

I suppose that by this illustration Dizzy 
meant that Peel was too much in the habit 
of discussing political questions on first 
principles. 

Mr. Gladstone went on to express surprise 
that the steam-engine was so long in being 

' Can Dizzy, when he used this metaphor, have been 
thinking of the son of the Vicar of Wakefield, who, being 
fain to embark on a tutorial career, was advertised of 
divers inconveniences of usherdom ? " ' Can you lie three 
in a bed ? ' ' No ! ' ' Then you won't do for a school.' " 

71 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

invented. I found that he did not know 
that there was a toy steam-engine in the 
Alexandrine Museum. He asked its date. 
I looked the question up, and afterwards 
informed him that Hero of Alexandria, in 
his Pneumatica (B.C. 130), says that he in- 
vented a steam apparatus for opening and 
shutting the great doors of a temple, and a 
toy globe which revolved by reaction from 
escaping steam. 

He wanted to ask mxe about Butler, but 
remarked, with a smile, " I fear that the time 
is short, as the question comprises the whole 
of conduct. I don't wish to speak disre- 
spectfully of a great critic ; but, when Mat- 
thew Arnold speaks of conduct as comprising 
75 per cent, of life, he seems to me to have 
spoken sheer nonsense." 

T. — " Surely he did not intend it to be 
taken quite seriously." 

G. — " Probably not; but, if he had not 
meant something, he would hardly have 
said it." 

T. — '* Do you mean that, in assigning 
three-quarters of life to conduct, he assigned 
too much or too little? " 

G. — " Too little. Conduct comprises the 
whole of life." 

72 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

7". — " He divides the other quarter of life 
between Science and Art. Surely, there- 
fore, when speaking of conduct, he uses the 
word in a technical sense as equivalent to 
moral conduct ; he is referring to le Men as 
opposed to le beau and le vrai. 

Mr. Gladstone said that this was probably 
so; but he did not seem satisfied. He com- 
plained of my having spoken in Stones of 
Stumbling of Nature as being neither moral 
nor immoral, but " outside morality"; and 
asked how I applied this to the formation of 
good and bad habits. I said that the nat- 
ural capacity of forming good habits, and 
the advantage resulting from their formation, 
may have been what Matthew Arnold had 
in view when he defined God as ** the Eter- 
nal, not ourselves, that makes for righteous- 
ness." Mr. Gladstone seemed to dissent 
from that definition. Returning to the ob- 
jection which he had made to my statement, 
that Nature is non-moral, I quoted Horace's 
well-known lines to the effect that piety 
grants no delay to wrinkles and old age. I 
insisted that, in regard to such visitations as 
earthquakes, and indeed to all agencies lying 
beyond human control. Nature is callously 
impartial in her treatment of good and bad 

73 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

men. The readers of the Record are, on an 
average, a more pious and praying class than 
the readers of the Times; and yet, after 
carefully studying the advertisements in 
these two journals, Mr. Francis Galton has 
discovered that the proportion of still births 
to ordinary births announced in the two jour- 
nals is exactly the same ; which is the more 
noteworthy as expectant mothers, in pro- 
portion as they are religious, are wont to 
be especially diligent in praying that their 
offspring may live. Mr. Gladstone's answer 
to me was on this wise: " Notwithstanding 
the apparently irregular distribution of tem- 
poral goods in this world, it is, I suppose, 
undeniable that godliness hath the promise 
of the life that now is, so far at least that 
good men, on the whole, have a happier lot 
than bad ones. If, in reply, we say that 
there are unexplained and grievous inequal- 
ities notwithstanding, may not the rejoinder 
be: (i) Philosophically, that it is unreason- 
able to suppose that the entire scheme 
of God's government would be within the 
comprehension of beings such as the 
generality of men, or even of the most 
considerable; (2) morally, in the words of 
Dante — 

74 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

' Or tu chi sei, che vuoi sedere a scranna, 
Per giudica da lungi mille miglia 
Con la veduta corta d'una spanna ? ' 

There is a very startling passage quoted by 
Southey from John Wesley, in his Life, 
where Wesley predicts that his followers, 
converted from vice and ignorance to be 
sober and regular in life, will infallibly be- 
come well-to-do, and will thereby fall into a 
new set of dangers and temptations. Were 
any man able humbly and intelligently to 
say that he had been treated worse than he 
deserved, this might be supposed to set up 
a case for him. But I am not such a man, 
having been treated, not worse, but far bet- 
ter ; so that I cannot travel by his road, even 
supposing it to be passable. The general 
experience of mankind seems to offer a firmer 
basis for indubitable argument than a com- 
parison of the advertisements in the Record 
or the Times. And, as regards the nee pietas 
moranty surely it is undeniable that what we 
call the virtuous man most commonly lives 
longer than those of opposite character." 

In this and other discussions with my re- 
vered friend, I was naturally often the victim, 
not exactly of an argumentum ad verecun- 
diaMy but of a silentium ob verecundiam. But 

75 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

naturally, also, my dim religious awe of him 
has abated with time; and I will therefore 
comment on one portion of what I cannot 
but regard as his inconclusive reasoning. In 
what sense can a man be treated by Provi- 
dence "worse'* or "better" than he de- 
serves? The needs of society compel us to 
annex suffering, not to all sins, but to 
crimes, as a punishment, or rather as a de- 
terrent ; but, apart from social needs, sin and 
suffering are incommensurable quantities. 
Is it not, therefore, as unmeaning to talk 
of an absolute relation between so much sin 
and so much suffering, or between so much 
virtue and so much happiness, as to talk of 
the distance between the 1st of January and 
Westminster Bridge? 

Present politics, it will be seen, have been 
hitherto barely touched upon. But, as Mr. 
Gladstone without present politics seems 
like the play without the part of Hamlet, I 
will here add that he afterwards expressed 
his conviction to one of my guests that at no 
distant time, not only will Home Rule in 
Ireland have been carried, but people will 
have a difificulty in understanding the state 
of mind which postponed the carrying of it 
so long. 

76 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I asked Mr. Gladstone again about Mar- 
bot's Memoirs ; and we fell to talking of the 
first Napoleon, for whom he entertained a 
quasi-admiration which took me by surprise. 
An Epicurean God, if he had deigned to 
bestow a thought on the inhabitants of our 
planet, would doubtless have regarded Napo- 
leon as the Goliath of Lilliput, as the biggest 
ant in the ant-hill, and, in a word, as some- 
what less insignificant and contemptible than 
his fellows. Such sages as Bacon and Goethe 
would have shared this view to the extent 
of thinking that, in our estimate of human 
achievements generally, as in our estimate 
of architecture, mere bulk must count for 
something. But a saint or a stern moralist 
would naturally have looked upon the great 
conqueror as a murderer on a huge scale, 
who ought to have been executed when con- 
victed of his first crime. It was, therefore, 
very interesting to me to observe that Mr. 
Gladstone seemed to feel — what nearly all 
men of imagination sometimes feel — an odd 
sort of sympathy even with such greatness 
as Napoleon's : with greatness divorced from 
goodness, with force which not merely makes 
history exciting {ut pueris placeas) but also 
stirs up the stagnant pools of civilisation. 

77 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I quoted to Mr. Gladstone the exclamation 
reported by Wellington as having been ut- 
tered by Talleyrand when someone, on hear- 
ing of Napoleon's death, called out, *' Quel 
^venement!" " Ce n'est plus un ^vene- 
ment," replied the master of epigram; " Ce 
n'est qu'une nouvelle. " Mr. Gladstone did 
not like this saying, which he criticised as 
follows: — -** Your anecdote about Talleyrand 
is singularly illustrative of the man, and of 
the blinding power of a cynical habit of mind. 
See how this nouvelle struck Manzoni, who 
thus describes the blank left in the world by 
the departure of that Giant : — 

*Ei f u ; Siccome immobile, 
Dato il mortal sospiro, 
Stette la spoglia immemore 
Orba di tanto spiro, 
Cosi percossa, attonita^ 
La terra al nunzio sta ; 
Muta pensando all' ultima 
Ora deir uom fatale, 
N6 sa quando una simile 
Orma di pi^ mortale 
La sua cruenta polvere 
A calpestar verrS..* 

This is the noble beginning of Manzoni*s 
noble ode called the Cinque Maggio.*' ^ 

^ This ode was translated by Mr. Gladstone. 

78 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

This ode of Manzoni on the death of 
Napoleon Mr. Gladstone pronounced to be 
the best thing that was written on the sub- 
ject. He thought Byron's ode a failure; 
and, on my demurring, he said it was cer- 
tainly not equal to Manzoni's. Goethe had 
paid Manzoni the compliment of translating 
the ode into German; but the translation 
was not equal to the original. At this point 
I cannot forbear asking: Was Talleyrand's 
exclamation really cynical? In saying that 
Napoleon's death, occurring when it did, 
was merely une nouvelle^ he was speaking the 
exact truth. Was it ungenerous of him to 
give utterance to that truth? Or should we 
not rather say that he was pointing the 
finger, not at Napoleon in exile, but at 
the contrast between Napoleon in exile and 
Napoleon in power, and at the caprice of 
Fortune by which the bewildering change 
had been brought about? In fact, he was 
laying stress on the tragic pathos of the 
great Emperor's career, and indirectly at 
the fragility of human greatness {Insigncm 
attenuat Deus). So that, when he thus 
contemplated 

*'The Desolator desolate, 
The Victor overthrown," 

79 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

or, if you will, Finein animce quce res humanas 
miscuit oliniy he was only expressing, in re= 
gard to Napoleon, the sentiment which 
Juvenal expressed about Hannibal, Johnson 
about Charles XII., and Scott about Rich- 
ard I. — 

"He left a name at which the world grew pale, 
To point a moral or adorn a tale." 

January 2nd, 1893. — The Gladstones dined 
with us. 

Mr. Gladstone never saw such a grand sea 
and such sheets of foam as on the shore of 
Biarritz; and he thought that, if Tennyson 
had seen it, he would have written about it. 

He is of opinion that Professor Bryce, in 
his account of the social aspects of America, 
has not dwelt enough on the influence of 
wealth. He thinks that the * * era of wealth, ' ' 
i.e, of colossal fortunes, is setting in ; and he 
regrets it. He spoke of Mr. A as re- 
ported to have two and a half millions a 
year: ** The Duke of Westminster is a pau- 
per to him! " He expected that in a cen- 
tury's time the chief landed estates in Eng- 
land would still be intact. He spoke of one 
of his own farmers as beginning with a small 
farm and borrowing money to work it, and 

80 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone. 

as now being able to pay his way. An Essex 
farmer had sent to Mr. Gladstone jars of jam 
in token of gratitude. 

I spoke of genius as being often one- 
sided. 

G. — " No. Talent is; genius is not." 

Seeing that I looked unconvinced, he 
asked me for an example of lopsided genius. 
I put the case of Milton. 

G. — " Oh, he is an exception to all 
rules. He is an enigma — quite inexpli- 
cable." 

He spoke in extremely strong terms 
against Milton's ideas of divorce which 
suited so ill with his Puritanism. He ob- 
jected to the assertion in Paradise Regained 
that the Greeks had borrowed everything 
from the Jews. I remarked that even the 
greatest men are under the influence of the 
traditions of their time. 

G. — ** I cannot admit that about Milton. 
If he had consistently kept to those tradi- 
tions, I would. But when he broke loose 
from them completely by writing as he did 
on divorce, he can no longer be excused on 
that ground." 

I cited Shelley as a one-sided man of 
genius; but Mr. Gladstone declined to admit 
6 8i 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the validity of this instance, on the ground 
that Shelley, dying young, never quite 
** broke loose from the eggshell." 

I was at the time preparing my article on 
*' Sir Richard Owen and Old World Memo- 
ries," which was afterwards published in 
the National Review {^\x\y 1893). Mr. Glad- 
stone furnished me with a few reminiscences 
of Owen, which were inserted in the article 
by his kind permission. It is enough for my 
present purpose to mention that he said to 
me, in reference to Owen, that seldom, if 
ever, had any man of science left on his mind 
such an impression of genius— not talent 
merely, but genius. Darwin had struck 
him in the same sort of way; but Darwin 
he had only met once in society. And he 
went on to explain that on the comparative 
merits of the two men of science he offered 
no opinion; but that, so far as his personal 
observation was concerned, Owen was the 
one who seemed to him to bear the stamp 
of genius most unmistakably. 

T. — * * Would you not also say that Huxley 
is unmistakably a man of genius? " 

G. — " Certainly not. Huxley has talent 
to any amount, but not genius. One of the 
younger men of science, Romanes, has struck 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

me a good deal. I should say that he has 
genius." 

With the greatest possible respect for 
Romanes, I was certainly startled at finding 
him (like the Prince Consort in the Albert 
Memorial) thus exalted over the heads of his 
fellows. The orthodox tendency of his later 
years may partly explain his being set above 
Huxley; but why did his distinguished critic 
prefer him even to those scientific men who 
were of the same way of thinking? May not 
this preference have been in some measure 
due to the fact that Mr. Gladstone regarded 
Romanes as, not merely a Christian, but as 
a proselyte, nay, as a reconverted pervert? 
In a word, is it not probable that there is 
joy among Anglicans over one heretic that 
recanteth more than over ninety and nine 
orthodox persons who need no recantation? 
Perhaps, after all, a recanting heretic is 
especially interesting because he is thought 
to be not quite safe, — to be, as it were, a 
hr d^nd pluckable from the burning. 

It may be worth adding in this connexion 
that I once heard Jowett express a doubt 
whether Mr. Gladstone himself could prop- 
erly be called a man of genius. An orator 
of genius, he said, utters many words and 

83 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

phrases which linger in men's memory, and 
hardly any word or phrase so lingering has 
been uttered by Mr. Gladstone. Surely this 
is too narrow a test. The faculty of phrase- 
making is no more the touchstone of genius 
than is many-sidedness of mind in the sig- 
nification of which Mr. Gladstone would 
have attached to that term, a signification 
which somehow recalls the satirical saw, 
Sapiuntj quia sentmnt 'inecum. 

But, after all, was not Jowett's criticism 
unjust to Mr. Gladstone in another way? 
Were all, or nearly all, the orator's charac- 
teristic sayings writ in water ? Perhaps I 
am paradoxical ; but I am inclined to think 
that the very popularity of some of his epi- 
grammatic sallies may have lessened the 
permanent credit which he has obtained for 
them. It may be said of epigrams, as of 
marriageable daughters, that the cleverer and 
more pleasing they are, the sooner are they 
likely to be dissociated from the author of 
their being. At any rate, the most widely 
applicable and widely circulated epigrams of 
a talker or orator, as distinguished from those 
of a writer, are liable to be thus de-personal- 
ised. This may account for the fact that so 
many of Mr. Gladstone's phrases have, to 

84 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

employ the familiar hyperbole, become Iliads 
without a Homer; or rather they have be- 
come Iliads with a not universally identified 
Homer. My meaning may be more or less 
appropriately illustrated by his phrase, " the 
sorrowful evidence of indisputable fact " ; by 
his (variously reported) assertion to the 
effect that Political Economy has now been 
relegated to the planet Saturn ; and perhaps, 
too, by his allegation that a notorious event 
had brought a needful reform " within the 
range of present politics." How many per- 
sons there are who, when they quote these 
and similar sayings of Mr. Gladstone, have 
no notion that it was he who uttered them ! 
The division of the population into the 
*' classes " and the ** masses " is said to have 
been popularised, but not originated, by 
him. Its real author is apparently unknown. 
So that here we have a wholly de-personal- 
ised epigram ; it has paid for its popularity 
by anonymity. Let me add that Mr. Glad- 
stone's own expression that England is 
guarded by a ** streak of silver sea " is often 
fathered on the Shakespearean John of 
Gaunt. This patriotic exclamation, or, as 
St. Paul would have said, this " confident 
boasting" of his, may suggest another re- 

85 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

flection. It is obvious to remark that the 
watery bulwark which he so highly valued 
would be, metaphorically as well as literally, 
undermined by the Channel Tunnel for 
which, as we shall see presently, he was so 
eager. Indeed, it must be understood, once 
for all, that I am not raising the question 
whether the Gladstonian apothegms to which 
I have referred were wisely and seasonably 
uttered. All I insist on is that they are 
" such stuff" as proverbs are made of; in 
other words, they have something about 
them which has brought them into social 
currency; and they have continued in circu- 
lation, not because of the famous image and 
superscription which they originally bore, but 
even after that image and superscription had 
been gradually effaced.^ 

Mr. Gladstone said that the Church of 
England took its form from Henry Vlll., 
Elizabeth, and Laud. He thought little of 
Cranmer on account of his moral weakness; 
and not much of Latimer. He said that 

' I have lately come across a remarkable passage which 
gives independent, if somewhat indirect, support to the 
general view set forth in this paragraph. " A writer," 
says Johnson, " who obtains his full purpose loses himself 
in his own lustre. ... Of an art universally practised, 
the first teacher is forgotten." 

86 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Latimer, when a Catholic, preached a ser- 
mon while a man was being roasted on a 
slow fire. 

G. — * * I have a weakness for Latimer, all 
the same." 

Thinking this too little praise for Latimer, 
I gave him (as the phrase goes) " a strange 
bed-fellow," by saying that I had a weak- 
ness for Charles I. 

G. — " So have I, although he was unfor- 
tunately such a liar! " 

I remarked that Shakespeare, if it had 
been his supreme misfortune to be one of 
the Stuart kings, might have found no open- 
ing for his dramatic genius, and might now 
be remembered only as uniting the faults of 
Charles I. and Charles II. The indifference 
with which he refers to Prince John's treat- 
ment of the rebels in Henry IV. Part IL 
shows that he had some sympathy with the 
view that no engagement was binding be- 
tween a king and rebel subjects. 

G. — '* I quite agree with you; indeed, I 
will go further. Shakespeare seems to me to 
have been a worshipper of the Tudor despot- 
ism. I say this with deep regret. The three 
great poets of the world would, I think, 
generally be admitted to be Homer, Dante 

87 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and Shakespeare ; the Germans would add 
Goethe. The morality of Dante is always 
pure and good. Homer, too, seems always 
to throw our sympathies on the right 
side." 

I demurred, and mentioned the case of 
Dolon. 

G. — ** That was a night march, and it was 
necessary to meet stratagem by stratagem.'* 

T. — ' * Diomed and Ulysses virtually prom- 
ised Dolon his life, and should have spared 
him." 

G. — " We must make allowance for the 
morality of Homer's day, and the little value 
that was then set on human life." 

To me it seems that the principle that he 
thus called to his aid is of such wide applica- 
tion that, if it proves anything, it proves 
more than he intended. Either men of 
genius are bound to rise above the moral 
standard of their age, or they are not. If 
they are, why excuse Homer? If they are 
not, why condemn Shakespeare? 

Mr. Gladstone said that Sir Henry Tay- 
lor, in his Correspondence, spoke of Walter 
Scott's moral judgments as being sound, but 
feeble. In explanation of this, Mr. Glad- 
stone added that, while setting the power of 

88 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

delineating character above any other, he 
himself thought that it tended to give such 
** objectivity " to the view of moral and im- 
moral conduct as to weaken the sense of sin. 
He promised to send me the reference to 
the passage in Taylor's Correspondence ; and, 
as will be seen further on, he kept his word. 
In return, I drew his attention to the fol- 
lowing observations of Ruskin : — 

"It was necessary he [Shakespeare] should lean 
no way ; that he should contemplate with absolute 
equality of judgment the life of the court, cloister, 
and tavern, and be able to sympathise so completely 
with all creatures as to deprive himself, together 
with his personal identity, even of his conscience, as 
he casts himself into their hearts. He must be able 
to enter into the soul of Falstaff or Shylock with no 
more sense of contempt or horror than Falstaff or 
Shylock themselves feel for or in themselves. He 
must be utterly without anger, utterly without pur- 
pose ; for if a man has any serious purpose in life, 
that which runs counter to it, or is foreign to U, will 
be looked at frowningly or carelessly by him." 

T,—'' Do you not call this passage inter- 
esting?" 

G,— ' I call it, not interesting merely, but 

wonderful." 

I spoke of Tennyson's admiration for the 
89 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

passage in Paradise Lost about ** Tammuz/* 
and for the line — 

" Of Abana and Pharphar, lucid streams." 

In regard to this line, Mr. Gladstone agreed 
with Tennyson, and he went on to quote 
with sonorous enthusiasm his favourite line 
in the Odyssey — 

and spoke of this as specially fine, because 
the sentiment is expressed by a woman. 
Clearly, however, the sentiment is not Pen- 
elope's, but Homer's. Would there not 
have been more point in Mr. Gladstone's 
remark if he had agreed with Mr. Samuel 
Butler in thinking that the Odyssey was 
written by a woman? 

He never quite forgave Walter Scott for 
the part he took about Queen Caroline's 
trial, or for his somewhat servile loyalty to 
"that creature George IV," Also he re- 
garded Scott's Toryism as " silly." I asked 
whether such Toryism was not inevitable in 
such an admirer of antiquity. In reply, he 
expressed a wish that modern Conservatives 
had a greater love of antiquity. Lord Salis- 
bury had broken too much from old tradi- 

90 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

tions in being at once Prime Minister and 
Foreign Secretary, and also in making Hux- 
ley a Privy Councillor. Mr. Gladstone would 
have preferred some other form of distinction 
for the great biologist. He was angry with 
the Conservatives for distributing G.C.B.'s 
broadcast before leaving office, among men 
who had no claim to them, and did not ex- 
pect them. He said that the Liberals were 
equally wanting in respect for antiquity ; but 
this was excusable in them — such a defect 
was their besetting sin. 

I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Gladstone. 

I quoted the Basque proverb, that " the 
needle, which clothes others, remains naked 
itself"; and applied it to France, which, 
while herself subject to Louis Napoleon, 
gave free institutions to Italy. He approved 
of the comparison, and went on to speak of 
the dangers of the Republic. But he re- 
marked that each form of government since 
the Revolution had lasted longer than the 
one before. (He cannot have counted the 
Republic of 1848.) I said that Charles Aus- 
tin used to maintain that France had lost 
her best chance of good government when 
she got rid of Louis Philippe. Mr. Glad- 

91 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

stone said that he was inclined to judge 
Louis Philippe severely, as having been 
narrow-minded. I spoke of his Ministers, 
and asked whether they were not responsible 
for the faults of his reign. Mr. Gladstone 
thought that they had acted under royal 
pressure, and that if Leopold had been their 
king the course of French history might 
have been different. 

I asked him what value he attached to the 
study and composition of Latin and Greek 
verses. I told him that Goethe advised 
everyone to repeat a few stanzas of good 
poetry daily, and added that I myself re- 
peated one of Horace's Odes daily. He 
advised me to set about translating them 
into English verse. He had done so quite 
recently. 

A friend of Bagehot's once said of Mr. 
Gladstone, '* He may be a good Christian, 
but he is an atrocious pagan." The word 
"pagan" is here used in a good sense. 
And, when it was denied that Mr. Gladstone 
was a good pagan, it was meant that he was 
not marked, as most Englishmen and phi- 
losophers of all countries are marked, by 
that dislike of extremes, and by those self- 
sufiicing and self-restraining qualities which 

92 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

go to make up the " magnanimous man " 
portrayed by Aristotle. He was no doubt 
open to this charge; yet even in him the 
wholesale pagan ingredient was not quite 
wanting. His continued study of Horace 
proves this. To study Horace is to learn 
nil ad7nirari ; and the prolonged effort of 
translating him must serve to dilute Chris- 
tian with pagan modes of feeling. 

Mr. Gladstone found that he could write 
Latin verses at least as well at sixty as when 
he was a young man. But he had since 
given it up. He was in favour of keeping up 
Latin verses, but was not eager for compul- 
sory English verses. He spoke of Charles 
Wesley as having written 120,000 lines of 
English verse — more than all the great epic 
poems of the world put together. He said 
there was a difference of opinion about how 
much Wesley had written ; but he thought 
that 4,000 hymns was a low estimate, and 
each of them he computed at thirty lines on 
an average. He thought him a much over- 
rated writer, ** Wrestling Jacob" being the 
only one he cared for. 

Does ** Wrestling Jacob," I would ask, 
deserve the praise it so often receives? Does 
not this versified allegory, even more than 

93 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the doxology after the Psalms, impress one 
as a sort of Vandalism, or, at least, as a jar- 
ring anachronism, by engrafting the highly- 
developed Catholic theology on one of the 
very oldest and rudest of Israelitish stocks? 
I mentioned that it was my habit to repeat 
Tennyson's " St. Agnes' Eve," and the 
canto of " In Memoriam ' ' beginning * * O yet 
we trust," on Sundays. This canto ex- 
presses my religious aspirations better than 
anything else. He asked me, evidently with 
an implied negative (equivalent to the Latin 
Num) discernible in his voice, whether I 
thought Tennyson a philosopher. I replied 
that our aspirations point to the conclusion 
that all evil may be educative. He hinted 
at the difificulty involved in the pain suffered 
by the lower animals, and said that he con- 
sidered ** the existence of evil inexplicable." 
I could not help calling to mind the con- 
siderations commonly adduced to prove the 
indispensability of evil — considerations to the 
effect that '* the rays of happiness, like those 
of light, are colourless when unbroken," 
and that even the horticulture of Eden would 
have grown wearisome without the snake. 
Or perhaps it would be a juster as well as a 
more pleasing metaphor to say that the 

94 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

world, like the water of Bethesda, has to be 
troubled in order that its latent virtue may 
be drawn out. But I felt that every such 
supposition must, at bottom, rest on the 
assumption that the Deity is limited in 
power, and that to Mr. Gladstone's mind 
the notion of such Divine limitation would 
be abhorrent. 

I asked him what he thought of Professor 
Mivart's article in the Nineteenth Century^ 
called " The Happiness in Hell." 

G. — " If a man begins by being tipsy 
sometimes, and ends by being dead drunk 
daily, — if he begins by beating his wife, and 
ends by killing her, I see no reason to think 
he will begin to improve as soon as he dies." 

I remarked that Dives is represented as 
testifying, when in ** torments," a sympathy 
with his surviving kinsfolk ; but I added that 
I did not pretend to draw from this expres- 
sion of sympathy the hopeful conclusion 
that many Broad Churchmen draw, namely, 
that he was not in Hell, but in Purgatory. 

G. — " I look upon Dives as a very mild 
instance. As landlords go, he was above 
the average ; he did let Lazarus have of his 
superfluities." 

Mr. Gladstone went on to hint that his 
95 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

case was not represented as beyond hope. 
I said that surely the text about the impass- 
able gulf suggested the idea that Dives' 
doom was final ; but Mr. Gladstone was not 
convinced. His last words about it were, 
" I will give you something to think over — 
Have time and space any existence outside the 
hwpnan intelligence ? '' ** Unquestionably, " 
I replied, " they exist for the animal intelli- 
gence." He said that he regarded that as 
the same thing on a small scale. And then 
came the final "God bless you." 

I had a talk with Mr. Gladstone in which 
he told me that he wished above all things 
to keep up righteous indignation. I replied 
that anyone who studied heredity, and felt 
how much some people are handicapped in 
the moral race, can hardly keep up an acute 
sense of sin ; and on that account I excused 
the deficiency of that sense in Shakespeare 
and Scott. He said that he did not see that 
Shakespeare and Scott were students of 
heredity, or that Shakespeare, at any rate, 
seemed at all conscious of the moral diffi- 
culties connected with it. I could not help 
thinking that, in speaking thus, he went too 
far. In Antony and Cleopatra, Lepidus says 

96 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

of Antony's faults that they are " hereditary 
rather than purchased; what he cannot 
change, than what he chooses." So, too, 
Hamlet cites the case of certain men having 

" Some vicious mole of nature in them, 
As in their birth (wherein they are not guilty, 
Since nature cannot choose his origin)." 

But it should be observed that, in these 
passages, Shakespeare seems to limit the 
plea of heredity to the case of venial faults, 
and that he fails to realise the full force of 
the difficulty. On the other hand, Tenny- 
son felt the difficulty in its widest scope, as 
is shown in the following passage, which he 
puts into the mouth of the cultivated villain 
in " The Promise of May " :— 

" He was only 
A poor philosopher who called the mind 
Of children a blank page, a tabula rasa. 
There, there, is written in invisible ink 
Lust, Prodigality, Covetousness, Craft, 
Cowardice, Murder — and the heat and fire 
Of life will bring them out, and black enough. 
So the child grew to manhood." 

I reminded Mr. Gladstone of the story 
that Baxter, seeing a criminal on his way to 
execution, exclaimed, ** There, but for the 
7 97 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

grace of God, goes Richard Baxter!" I 
remarked that I had heard a Hke saying 
ascribed to Sir Matthew Hale. 

Mr. Gladstone believed that its date was 
farther back, and that its author was Brad- 
ford, the martyr under Queen Mary. The 
saying points to the conclusion that men 
are to a great extent the creatures of cir- 
cumstance. Our conversation was thus 
brought back to the perennial suit in the 
Court of Morality, which m.ay be designated 
as the case of Necessity versus Responsi- 
bility. Mr. Gladstone had once significantly 
exhorted me to be careful not to blunt my 
sense of sin ; and I thought that he scarcely 
understood the process by which the ** smil- 
ing toleration ' ' commended by Goethe forces 
itself upon some naturally rigid moralists in 
their own despite. I was anxious to illus- 
trate clearly my point of view ; and I there- 
fore (in biblical phrase) " took up my par- 
able " as follows: Let us start with the 
supposition — no matter how extravagant — 
that a band of Anarchists, incensed against 
their leading countrymen, revenge them- 
selves by kidnapping m.any infant sons of 
bishops, statesmen, and even princes; that 
the poor children, captured too young to 

98 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

retain any recollection of their home and 
parentage, are brought up to prefer evil to 
good ; and that their corruptors, by dexter- 
ous lying, inoculate them with a rancorous 
hatred against peaceful, and especially 
against rich citizens. Let it be also as- 
sumed that the bereaved parents suppose 
that their lost ones have been accidentally 
killed in some manner (as by drowning in 
the sea), which would account for the dis- 
appearance of their bodies, and that they 
are gradually consoled by reflecting that 
some at least of their other sons bid fair to 
earn credit and distinction. Let us now skip 
twenty or thirty years, and imagine that, 
just when those early promises of credit and 
distinction are beginning to be realised, some 
atrocious murders are brought home to 
youths who look as if Nature had designed 
them for better things ; and that, as soon as 
sentence of death has been passed on the 
offenders, the original kidnappers, from some 
safe hiding-place, let it be known that those 
felons of aristocratic mien are the sons of 
distinguished parents, and are kinsmen — in 
a few instances, perhaps, twin-brothers — of 
some of the most rising men in the country. 
The law would presumably be left to take 

99 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

its course ; but the irresponsible murderers 
(so to call them) would excite compassion 
rather than indignation. They would be 
thought to have sinned, and to be about 
to suffer, as it were by accident. Nor would 
compassion be limited to these particular 
offenders. Presently, what may be called 
the intellectualising but demoralising ques- 
tion would begin to be asked: May not 
many of our worst criminals be men who, 
but for a caprice of fortune, would have 
given proof of possessing true hearts and 
** hands that the rod of empire might have 
swayed "? And thus life would come to be 
regarded as a cruel farce, in which the play- 
ers act by compulsion, and every player who 
has to act a villain's part is punished for the 
villain's crimes. Thus, we seem to be in a 
vicious circle from which there is no escape. 
If we acknowledge with Madame de Stael 
that ** Tout comprendre, c'est tout pardon- 
ner," we are bound to add " Tout par- 
donner, c'est ^teindre la morale." 

After first listening with exemplary pa- 
tience to what may be termed these para- 
bolic reflections, and then expressing a doubt 
whether Madame de Stael meant her mot to 
be taken quite literally, Mr. Gladstone went 

lOO 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

on to say: "I will go the length of admit- 
ting that, even in the extreme case of pro- 
nouncing the sentence of death, a judge, if 
he is really a Christian man, will be liable to 
say to himself, * God knows how much that 
man has been tempted, and though for the 
sake of Society I am bound to punish him, 
he may on the Judgment Day be preferred 

before me.' " 

I rejoined that many modern thinkers 
would hold that, if full allowance were made 
for heredity, education and temptation, then 
judge, criminal, and everyone else would 
stand exactly on a level. When a man has 
been thoroughly worsted by another in the 
moral •race, may we not assume that he has 
laboured under a corresponding disadvan- 
tage? nay, that the extent of the defeat is 
exactly measured by the amount of the 
handicap? 

G.—'' No; I cannot admit that." 
In illustration of the view to which he was 
opposed, I am tempted to mention that, in 
one of the most "modern" of Lucian's 
Dialogues, the ghost of an outrageous crim- 
inal, after being condemned to the most 
varied and unremitting tortures that the 
nether regions can provide, sets up the plea 

lOI 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

that he was throughout the victim of Des- 
tiny; and Minos is at his wits' end to know 
how to deal with him. 

Reverting to a topic referred to in a former 
conversation, I spoke about the immense 
popularity which was at the time achieved 
by Sheridan's Begum Speech, and which 
modern readers find it hard to understand. 
Can that speech have been well reported? 

G. — " Has any speech of that time, any 
speech (for example) of either of the Pitts, 
been well reported? The younger Pitt is 
chiefly known, as an orator, for his happy 
quotations. When taunted with his youth, 
he applied to himself Horace's 

* probamque 
Pauperiem sine dote quaero * — 

the preceding clause, * mea Virtute me in- 
volvo,' being conspicuous by its omission. 
He applied most unjustly to Ireland and 
England the lines about being under equal 
laws ; and there was also the quotation from 
Virgil which he introduced into his speech 
against the slave trade." ^ 

* " He [Pitt] burst as it were into a prophetic vision of 
the civilisation that shall dawn upon Africa, and recalled 
the not less than African barbarism of heathen Britain ; 
exclaiming, as the first beams of the morning sun pierced 

I02 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I reminded him that Pitt quoted the 
stanza, beginning Duris ut ilex, in reference 
to the attempts made by Napoleon to 
weaken Great Britain by injuring her colo- 
nies and her trade. He regretted that no 
such quotations are given or would be under- 
stood now. 

He said that he was " suffused with 
shame" about the conduct of the EngHsh 
in regard to the Channel Tunnel. It used 
to be said that the opposition to it came 
from one man, namely, Lord Palmerston. 
But then the panic arose. At the request 
of the English Government, the French took 
great trouble to make inquiries as to the 
practicability of the scheme. 

G. — " We English plume ourselves on our 
common sense, and are never tired of laugh- 
ing at the frivolity and vacillation of the 
French. But, since the Norman Conquest, 

the windows of Parliament, and appeared to suggest the 
quotation : — 

' Nos . . . primus equis Oriens afflavit anhelis, 
lUic sera rubens accendit lumina Vesper.' " 

Lord Rosebery's Pitt. 

The point of comparison seems to have been that the 
blessing of freedom was granted to the English at the 
dawn of their history, but that it was being vouchsafed to 
the negroes only at the eleventh hour. 

103 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the EngHsh have invaded France at least ten 
times as often as the French have invaded 
England. And yet the English now raise 
this outcry about the risk of a French inva- 
sion." 

I put in a word about the French conscrip- 
tion, and about their army being now much 
stronger than ours. 

" From your speaking in that way/' he 
said, with a smile, ** I see what line you are 
disposed to take about the tunnel." 

The orator in him came out when he made 
the somewhat extravagant statement, that 
Pius IX. was more ignorant than he thought 
any educated man could be; for his Holi- 
ness had said that there were half a million 
of Catholics in Glasgow. I imagine that his 
Holiness, if Mr. Gladstone rightly under- 
stood him, must have confounded the num- 
ber of Catholics in Glasgow with that of the 
entire population. Mr. Gladstone surprised 
me by knowing accurately the population of 
Liverpool, and the number of Catholics 
there. He appeared to think that, if the 
Scotch Kirk were disestablished, the result 
might be a fusion of the three Presbyterian 
bodies. 

He seemed irritated with the German 
104 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

writers, who taught that the IHad and the 
Odyssey were made up, as he said, " of a 
fortuitous concourse of atoms." Goethe 
never favoured this view. Mr. Gladstone 
went on to advert to the extreme clumsiness 
of German prose, always excepting that of 
a few great writers. He spoke of German 
prose as being " worthy of African savages.** 
Being asked how he explained this, he com- 
pared the German prose of the present day 
to the English prose of two or three centu- 
ries ago. I said that Matthew Arnold spoke 
of the function of the eighteenth century in 
England as being to create a prose literature. 
He replied that he did not know that Mat- 
thew Arnold had said this ; but that he quite 
agreed. 

A propos of modern views on eternal pun- 
ishment, he pronounced the besetting sins 
of rationalistic writers to be " negation and 
timidity." I objected that in Mr. John 
Morley and others we find negation, but 
certainly not timidity. He said that he was 
not speaking of such men, and did not use 
the word ''negation" in that sense. He 
seemed to use the word as equivalent to 
a conscious or unconscious moral scepti- 
cism. 

105 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

He again gave utterance to the opinion 
expressed by him in a former conversation, 
that Matthew Arnold ought to have rep- 
resented conduct as comprising, not only 
three-quarters of life, but the whole of it. 
In vindication of the great critic, I reminded 
Mr. Gladstone that he himself in his Ro- 
manes Lecture had ranked Bacon among 
those of whom Cambridge ought to be proud. 
Now, if conduct comprises the whole of life, 
every man ought to be judged by an exclu- 
sively moral standard ; and, if Bacon were so 
judged, Cambridge would have no cause to 
be proud of him. His title to admiration 
is based on that portion — Matthew Arnold 
would say that fourth part— of life which 
lies outside the domain of morality. This 
"wisest, brightest, meanest of mankind" 
is more praised for his wisdom and bright- 
ness than he is condemned for his meanness. 
As a schoolboy might say, he obtained more 
marks for his Philosophical papers and his 
Essays, than his virtuous contemporaries 
obtained for their good conduct. 

Mr. Gladstone replied that he had only 
been assigning to Bacon his rank in respect 
of ability. But I could not see that this 
met the difficulty. Cambridge would not 

io6 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

have cause to be proud of having produced 
a very able conspirator or traitor. 

Mr. Gladstone went on to say that, when 
he gave the Romanes Lecture, he thought 
that before this century Cambridge had had 
the distinct advantage in regard to poets; 
but Mr. Arthur Galton had given instances 
of Cambridge poets who took a disHke to 
Cambridge, and in some cases preferred 
Oxford. He said that Dryden spoke, in 
this relation, of going from Thebes to 
Athens ; and he wondered, if, in thus giving 
the palm to Oxford, Dryden was a liar, or, 
as he expressed it, "a rogue." He ex- 
pressed great admiration for Dryden *s power 
of arguing in verse, as shown in '* The Hind 
and Panther." He spoke of Thomas Crom- 
well as a wonderful man, though ** some- 
thing of a rogue." He had never heard the 
famous answer in an examination to the 
question, " What do you know of Oliver 
Cromwell?" " He cut off his king's head, 
and usurped the kingdom. Afterwards he 
was filled with remorse, and exclaimed, when 
dying, * Would that I had served my God 
as I have served my king ! ' " 

The conversation passed on to the subject 
of Malapropisms, which seemed to amuse 

107 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Mr. Gladstone. Someone mentioned that 
a lady friend, observing that one of her 
horses was in much better condition than 
his mate, was told by the groom, ** This one 
domesticates his food better than the other." 
This was capped by the true story of the 
lady, who, having complained to her butcher 
that the meat he had sent her was high, was 
met with the surprised and surprising re- 
joinder, ** You putrefy me with amaze- 
ment ! " 

I called Mr. Gladstone's attention to a 
line in Milton's translation of the Ode Quis 
mult a gracilis — 

" Who, always vacant, always amiable, 
Hopes thee " : 

and I expressed an opinion that an inverted 
sentence of this kind is less plain in English 
than in Latin. This led on to Mr. Glad- 
stone's saying that he was in favour of orig- 
inal classical compositions ; but he owned to 
having some misgivings. 

He regarded with " mingled jealousy and 
admiration " the purity of Bright's English, 
but said that Bright had once fallen into one 
of the " worst of vulgarisms " ; Bright used 
the verb "to transpire" in the sense of 

io8 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

'' to occur." Mr. Gladstone remarked that 
" transpire " properly meant '* to ooze out." 
I reminded him that "to perspire " in French 
was '* transpirer," and was surprised to find 
that this was news to him. 

He was struck by the way in which some 
eminent scholars who were also masters of 
English, such as Roundell Palmer, showed 
no classical flavour in their English composi- 
tions. Lowe was a great exception to this. 

G. •* If people went into an extreme 

about Classics, the last half of the nineteenth 
century has gone into just as great an ex- 
treme about modern languages. I believe 
that science will be the great instrument of 
education in the future. You may find 
something to suit all intellectual needs in 
the various sciences from Astronomy to — 
what shall I say?" 

T,— ' To Gastronomy?" 
G, {smiling)—'" No— to Embryology." 
He said that he had called Mill the ** Saint 
of Rationalism," and gave as an example of 
his saintliness that, when a rather bitter 
attack had been made on him by Lowe in a 
debate on reform, he attempted no retort, 
but merely confined himself to the point at 
issue. I referred to the lady who, after talk- 

109 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

ing to Littr^, said, ** Je viens de parler k un 
saint qui ne croit pas en Dieu." Mr. Glad- 
stone laughed and said, " Yes; but I have 
the advantage of priority. This is not a 
case of Per e ant qui nostra ante nos dixerint. 
How trying that sort of thing is ! " 

T. — * * Per e ant qui nostra post nos dixerint. 
This seems to me to represent a state of 
things more trying still; — when one has 
originated an idea, and some more conspicu- 
ous person cribs it, and gets the credit for 
it." 

December ^otk, 1893. — It may be conven- 
ient here to insert some notes of a conversa- 
tion with Mr. Gladstone with which a learned 
divine, who lives near Biarritz, has kindly 
furnished me: — 

** Mr. Gladstone talked a little on the 
general principles of Political Economy. 
On the actual distribution of wealth he felt 
uneasy, and he thought that the irresponsi- 
bility in the condition of holding wealth 
nowadays, especially in the United States, 
and the difficulty or impossibility of bring- 
ing home to men the responsibility of riches 
held under their present conditions, was the 
black spot in the future. 

no 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

** The history of Ireland, he said, was un- 
like that of any other nation. The oppres- 
sion of it by England had not been the op- 
pression of a race who had once been con- 
querors or dangerous ; like that of the Poles 
by Russians, or of the Moors by Spaniards. 
The Irish had done nothing to warrant the 
oppression ; they were only reclaiming that 
of which they had been gratuitously de- 
prived, and we owe them restoration of the 
theft. 

" He told me about the difificulty which 
he felt in making his ecclesiastical appoint- 
ments; he had always endeavoured in par- 
ishes to find the best man to carry on the 
work on the general lines of his predecessor. 
He was anxious not to appoint a High 
Churchman to a Low Church parish, nor 
vice versd. But it was very difficult to tell 
how a man would be received, or how he 
might turn out. He instanced his appoint- 
ment of Dr. L to the parish of . 

He thought that he had got the very man 
to follow a good evangelical, with hearty 
services. To his surprise he received a depu- 
tation, with the late incumbent at the head, 
and a petition with 2,000 signatures, pro- 
testing against the appointment. He ap- 

III 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

pealed privately to Dr. L to resign, 

promising some compensatory post, and 
offering pecuniary indemnity for his ex- 
penses. But Dr. L said that he had 

gone too far to retire with honour, and that 
his friends in the neighbourhood assured 
him that the opposition was factitious, and 
that the majority of the parish was not 
averse to him. So Mr. Gladstone yielded. 
A year afterwards he found the Doctor most 
popular, with a crowded church, hearty ser- 
vices, and not above twenty malcontents in 
the parish. 

" He spoke much of the superficiality of 
popular writing on Theology, and of the 
ordinary sermons, especially those of the 
Low Church school. The teaching was so 
loose and vague ; it gave nothing to do, no 
rule of conduct, * Only believe all is right 
with you, and all will somehow come right 
at the last. ' Many High Churchmen preached 
more really evangelical sermons than the 
Low Churchmen did. The popular teach- 
ing on Eschatology was most superficial. 
He praised Mr. Oxenham's book on the 
subject much, and called it logical and con- 
vincing. Universalism really implied dual- 
ism ; and it was no vindication to say that 

112 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

in the final casting up of accounts the bal- 
ance would be found on the side of good. 
Annihilation could not be the end. The 
real problem was that of the origin and 
existence of evil, not its extinction ; and this 
problem was wholly insoluble by man. The 
unfallen angels and spirits showed that evil 
was not a necessity, or a necessary condition 
of created existence. 

** He agreed that all human knowledge 
was relative ; religious knowledge being no 
more absolute than any other. Newman 
was not great as a philosopher; but in spir- 
itual matters, and in the knowledge of and 
the power of probing the human heart. He 
spoke indignantly of the prosecutions of 
Ritualists by the Church Association. They 
were a failure always, whether won or lost. 
They provoked reaction, and produced what 
they were intended to stop. He hoped that 
there would be no more of them, and that 
the bishops would stop them by their veto. 
In answer to a suggestion that there should 
be Standing Committees of Convocation 
something like the Congregations and the 
Holy Office at Rome, not to judge individ- 
uals, but to decide on the questions and 
abstract cases submitted to them, he said 
8 113 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

that the difficulty would be to find a body 
of theologians in the English Church whose 
decisions or opinions would inspire sufficient 
respect. 

** He was asked if he had observed the 
singular absence of the sense of sin in the 
works of American divines of all schools. 
* Ah/ said he slowly, * the sense of sin — that 
is the great want in modern life ; it is want- 
ing in our sermons, wanting everywhere!' 
This was said slowly and reflectively, almost 
like a monologue. 

** Then he talked of Driver's criticism of 
the 51st Psalm to the effect that it could 
not be by David because of the verse, 
'Against Thee, Thee only have I sinned.' 
He had injured Uriah and Bathsheba. 

** G. — * Where sin against God is really 
felt, that absorbs the other. Any sin against 
man is light in comparison of the sin against 
God.' 

" He agreed that Againt Thee, etc., is the 
correlative of Who can forgive sins but God 
only ? 1 

** Mr. Gladstone's attention was next 

^ Is not more conclusive evidence of the post-Davidic, or 
rather post-Exilian, date of the Psalm furnished by the 
phrase, " Build Thou the walls of Jerusalem " ? (L. A. T.) 

"4 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

called to D. G. Azcarates' Discurso in Span- 
ish at the Ateneo of Madrid. The writer 
speaks of Mr. Gladstone as crowning his 
unparalleled career by bringing home the 
responsibilities of wealth to Londoners. 
Mr. Gladstone said that this is not so much 
needed in London as in the United States: 
in London they are becoming aware of the 
responsibility attaching to riches." 

The friend who has supplied me with the 
foregoing materials concludes with this com- 
ment: — 

** My impressions of last year as to Mr. 
Gladstone's earnest piety, immense range of 
thought and learning, and wonderful phys- 
ical power, and of the persuasive manage- 
ment of his voice, were but heightened this 
year. He would have* been a great theo- 
logian if he had not been so great a states- 
man." 

January 2\th, 1894. — Mr. and Mrs. Glad- 
stone dined with us. 

I said that I supposed that there were 
more means for the endowment of research 
in Germany than in England. Mr. Glad- 
stone rejoined that he thought that the 
collective sum from which such men as 

115 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Wordsworth and Tennyson received pen- 
sions was ;^30,ooo a year. I called atten- 
tion to the increased endowment of research 
at Oxford. He spoke of it as strange that 
in no other country were there such large 
sums for the endowment of education, and 
I yet there is no country where education is 
so expensive. He believed that Eton was 
more expensive now than in his younger 
days, and that Harrow was more expensive 
still. In the case of Eton, the modus oper- 
andi of the change was through the masters 
more and more encroaching on the dames. 
Being asked whether he did not think that 
the reason was that it was wished to make 
public schools the especial resort of gentle- 
men's sons, he said, ** No, no; it is very 
disgraceful, but not quite so bad as that." 
I quoted Renan's saying to the effect that 
there is no second-rate University in Ger- 
many, with its ** Professeurs haves et fam^- 
liques," which has not done more for intel- 
lectual progress than the great aristocratic 
University of Oxford, ** avec ses revenues 
immenses, ses colleges splendides, ses Fel- 
lows paresseux." He did not agree. ** I 
don't believe a word of it," he said. In 
confirmation, however, of Renan's opinion, 

ii6 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

which was also Mark Pattison's, I will quote 
a passage from Bagehot, who considered the 
Saturday Review, whose contributors in his 
time were mainly University men, to be a 
sort of thermometer indicating the moral 
temperature of our English Universities. 
He says of that Journal: — 

" We may search and search in vain 
through this repository of the results of 
* University teaching ' for a single truth 
which it has established, for a single high 
cause which it has advanced, for a single 
deep thought which is to sink into the mind 
of its readers. We have, indeed, a nearly 
perfect embodiment of the corrective scepti- 
cism of a sleepy intellect." 

Mr. Gladstone quoted a saying of Napo- 
leon from Taine's posthumous volume: ** Je 
ne crois pas aux religions ; mais qui a fait 
tout ceci? . . . les pretres valent mieux 
que les Cagliostro, les Kant, et tous les 
reveurs d'AUemagne. " He chuckled over 
the reference to Kant. He said: ** When 
next I see Lord Acton, I mean to quote this 
to him. He is a great admirer of Kant's 
writings, and it will be good for him to be 
told what Napoleon thought of them ! Gen- 
erally, when I try to surprise him by a 

117 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

quotation, he tells me exactly where it 
comes from." 

He repeated a passage from another French 
writer in reference to Napoleon: '* Nous 
avons assez entendu parler du Fils de 
r Homme; mais Napoleon ^tait 1' Homme 
lui-meme." 

G. — " He put him far above our Saviour." 

The book increased Mr. Gladstone's sense 
of Napoleon's supreme greatness, but did 
not raise his view of the Emperor's moral 
character. 

He spoke of Pearson's National Life and 
Character. He seemed especially interested 
in the author's statement that the crowding 
of men in big towns may force on State 
Socialism ; but he agreed with me that 
Pearson's own sympathies were in favour 
of Individualism, State Socialism being at 
best a necessary evil. I objected to Pear- 
son's notion that Western Europe would 
ever allow itself to be encroached upon and 
practically overwhelmed by immigrants from 
the yellow races. Would not our descend- 
ants defend themselves by arms? They 
might vindicate such a summary proceeding 
by saying (in dog Latin) sahis civilisationisy 
suprema lex. Mr. Gladstone, however, 

ii8 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

laughed at the idea of our descendants tak- 
ing refuge in strong measures: ** If the 
cultivated races cannot defend themselves 
without appealing to brute force, God help 
them!" 

I said that I used to write in preference 
books, that I wished that my lot could have 
been thrown in the distant future, but that 
now I am satisfied with the nineteenth 
century. 

G. — " I should have chosen the time of 
Homer." 

We spoke of the conservative tendency of 
such pessimistic views as Pearson's ; and Mr. 
Gladstone went on to say that he thought 
he remembered the account that I had given 
of my own views in my article on my father 
a year or two earlier,^ but he was afraid of 
misquoting me. I replied that I thought 
that he was paying me the greatest possible 
compliment in remembering anything about 
it. He seemed not to approve of my Whig- 
gism. I explained that by education, tradi- 
tion and temperament I am strongly Con- 
servative; but that I call myself " Conserva- 
tive," not a Conservative. He admitted 

'"Lord Tollemache and His Anecdotes," Fortnightly 
Review^ July i8g2. 

119 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

that he also was Conservative in a certain 
sense. I spoke of the Conservative influ- 
ence of ladies' society. He demurred to 
the implied statement that women are more 
Conservative than men. He should rather 
describe them as *' more emotional." He, 
however, agreed that they are more under 
the influence of the clergy. I spoke of 
women's influence at municipal elections and 
at elections for the school board. He 
doubted whether their influence is Con- 
servative in either of these cases. But he 
said that the women chosen are scarcely 
typical women. I quite agreed ; but I ex- 
plained that I was referring to the influence 
of the many women who vote at these elec- 
tions, and not of the few who are elected. 

From clever women in general, the con- 
versation passed on to George Eliot. Mr. 
Gladstone considered her rather a man 
than a woman. Silas Marner is the work of 
hers that he most admired. But he com- 
plained that her novels ** were out of tune." 
I remarked that at the end of the seventh of 
the eight parts in which Middlemarch first 
appeared, one hoped that Dorothea would 
marry Lydgate. Mr. Gladstone intimated 
his assent. 

I20 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

He told me that his great admiration for 
Scott was tempered by regret that he was 
weighed down by so much inferior work. 
A similar criticism he applied to Shake- 
speare, though in a less degree. I spoke 
of Lord Lytton's portraiture (in the Last of 
the Barons) of Gloucester (Richard III.), and 
especially of Warwick, as more lifelike than 
Shakespeare's. To my surprise Mr. Glad- 
stone seemed not to know who the last of 
the Barons was. He pleaded that it was 
doubtful whether the latter part of Henry VI. 
was by Shakespeare, but admitted that there 
is something very arbitrary In the way In 
which critics decide by internal evidence 
what Is Shakespeare's and what is not. 

He said that his favourites among Scott's 
novels were Kenilworth and the Bride of 
Lammermoor. I asked whether he did not 
find the bad endings of these two novels 
depressing. 

G, — " I don't mind that In such works of 
art as these." 

I told him that the Bride of Lammermoor 
was also Jowett's favourite. 

G. — " I am very glad to hear It; and I 
will quote the statement on your authority." 
He went on to say that the three novels of 

121 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Scott which are generally the most popular 
are Ivanhoe, Old Mortality and Waverley. 
He ranked those next to the two others. 
Returning to George Eliot, he surprised me 
by saying that he had never read Daniel 
Deronda. Something was said about George 
Eliot's enthusiasm for the Jews, which at 
last became almost as vehement as Disraeli's. 
Both these writers sometimes leave the im- 
pression of looking forward to the restora- 
tion of the old Hebrew Monarchy. Might 
they not (adapting Virgil) have taken for 
their motto : Jam redit et David, redeiint 
Solo7nonia regna f 

Hence we drifted into the Germans' hatred 
of the Jews. 

G. — ** I used to think the Irish the most 
oppressed people on earth ; but now I think 
that the Jews have been even more op- 
pressed. I believe that Dollinger wrote in 
favour of the Jews; and I thought it very 
creditable of him to do so. I understand 
that the kings in the Middle Ages, including 
even King John, often took the part of the 
Jews against the nobles. Was it because 
they wished to save the Jews from oppres- 
sion? Nothing of the sort. But they con- 
sidered that the right to torture a Jew and 

122 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

to extort money from him ought to be a 
monopoly of their own." He did not deny 
that the Jews had their faults. After prais- 
ing Finlay's History in high terms, he said 
that he had there learnt that towards the end 
of the Middle Ages the Greek Christians had 
a bad time of it ; for, while the Mahometans 
hated them as infidels, and the Catholics 
hated them as heretics, the Jews took ad- 
vantage of their weakness to settle old scores 
with them. 

G. — " Lord Acton is writing a history of 
Liberty, and I shall be anxious to see how 
he will treat the question of the Jews." 

T. — " In writing such a work, is he not 
likely to get into trouble with the Roman 
authorities? " 

G. — " His work may be put on the Index ; 
but that is all. They will never excom- 
municate an English Peer. I always say 
that, if Lord Acton had written what Bol- 
linger has written, and vice versd, it would 
still have been the Professor who would have 
got into trouble, while the Peer would have 
escaped scot free." 

We talked about the old Greeks. 

G. — ** I am a great admirer of the old 
Olympian religion, as it was set forth by the 

123 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

supreme genius of Homer. It was quite 
different in the hands of the later Greeks; 
and the mythology of the Roman poets 
serves as an opaque curtain which hides it 
from us. Do the Romans mark the differ- 
ence between Venus and Diana, as the 
Greeks do between Aphrodite and Artemis? 
Look at the contrast between Virgil and 
Homer! " 

T. — " Surely Virgil does not write much 
about Diana? *' 

G. — " He has the line: 

' Tergeminamque Hecaten, tria virginis ora Dianas.' 

See, too, how Horace confounds Diana with 
Proserpine in the passage : 

' Infernis neque enim tenebris Diana pudicum 
Liberal Hippolytum.'" 

I suggested that in this instance Horace 
seemed to me to refer to Diana, not as 
identical with Proserpine, but as the god- 
dess whom Hippolytus especially wor- 
shipped. Mr. Gladstone frankly said that 
this was a new idea to him, but that he 
would think it over. 

He supposed that Horace, though his 
Odes were Greek in form, was the best 

124 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

authority for the state of Roman society in 
classical times. But the discrepancies in his 
account are a puzzle. Sometimes he writes 
in glowing language; at other times he 
speaks of the state of society as hopelessly 
corrupt. Mr. Gladstone could not accept 
the common interpretation of 

"O utinam nova 
Incude diffingas retusam in 

Massagetas Arabasque ferrum." 

This he explained to mean: " Break up our 
corrupt civilisation, and remould us after the 
fashion of barbarous tribes." I demurred 
to this explanation ; but, in support of it, I 
reminded him of the Arva beata^ etc., which 
seems to have partly suggested the passage 
in Locksley Hall, beginning — 

" Ah, for some retreat 
Deep in yonder shining Orient." 

Another passage which he thought wrongly 
interpreted is — 

" Nee fortuitum spernere caespitem 
Leges sinebant." 

G. — ** I do not think there is any point in 
the rendering * chance turf.' What would 

125 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

they do with it? Not build. Conington 
suggests that they might make their roofs 
of it. I know that they so construct their 
roofs in Iceland and elsewhere, where it is 
hard to get wood. But otherwise I do not 
think that they would make their roofs of 
turf alone. I think it refers to the enclosure 
of commons, and so it touches on a question 
which has lately been coming to the front." 

I asked how he explained ** spernere. " 
He said that it meant '* to disregard the 
laws which forbid the appropriation of the 
ager publicusJ' But he admitted that his 
view was not free from difidculty. 

I said that we probably learn as much 
about Roman society from Juvenal, though 
his account must be taken as a caricature; 
and I added that, as Matthew Arnold says, 
we gather from Marcus Aurelius that there 
must have been a large portion of Italian 
life free from the corruption which Juvenal 
describes. Mr. Gladstone quite agreed. 

We talked about Mr. Gladstone's Ro- 
manes Lecture. I told him that in that 
lecture he appeared to me to ignore the 
great progress in jurisprudence made by 
the Romans under the Empire; and that, 
on the other hand, he laid too great, or at 

126 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

any rate too exclusive, stress on their prog- 
ress in arms. He replied by calling my 
attention to the military achievements of 
Belisarius and Narses. But I confess that 
he seemed to me to be ascribing to progress 
in the military art what was rather due to 
the military genius of a few individuals. I 
quoted what Maine, in his Ancient Law, 
said about the great development of juris- 
prudence under the Roman Empire. 

Q^ «* I give way on this point to the 

authority of such an expert as Maine. But 
in the lecture I was trying to insist that life 
had departed from the Roman civilisation. 
What remarkable men did that civilisation 

produce? " 

I mentioned Claudian. 

G.—'' Yes, but that is not saying much. 
I think that the decline of paganism has 
never been sufficiently explained. Gibbon's 
account is too one-sided. I wish it could 
have been discussed by such a writer as 
Hallam." He spoke in praise of Beugnot's 
Decadence du Paganisme en. Occident. Beu- 
gnot also wrote a Decadence en Orient, but it 
was not so good. The former book was 
Couronn^e par V Academic francaise in 1826. 
" This is not much of a distinction now, but 

127 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

it was then." He spoke of the long resist- 
ance offered by Paganism to Christianity. 

G. — " Probably many of the * pagani * were 
devout pagans, and there seem to have been 
also some devout pagans among the edu- 
cated classes. But these latter were few; 
and Beugnot traces the different causes, such 
as historical and family traditions, and more 
interested motives, which prolonged the life 
of dying Paganism." 

T. — *' Besides the believers in Paganism, 
were there not many who bore to Paganism 
the same sort of relation that Matthew 
Arnold bore to Christianity? I refer to 
such men as Marcus Aurelius, who thought 
it important that the masses should have a 
religion, and who held that the best religion 
for them was the religion of the State. Such 
men would probably have wished to purify 
the national religion of some of its coarser 
elements; but, in general, they would be 
afraid, to use Bright's metaphor, of tinkering 
an old institution." 

G. — " Very likely there were a good num- 
ber of these; and the position of Marcus 
Aurelius may in some respects have been 
like that of Matthew Arnold. But Marcus 
Aurelius did not write about his religion in 

128 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the patronising way in which Matthew Ar- 
nold writes about Christianity. I know 
nothing that jars me more than the tone he 
takes." 

T, — ** Was not that partly the peculiar 
manner of the man? " 

G. — ** It may have been ; but I often wish 
that he would make his bow and walk on 
the other side. To come back to my Ro- 
manes Lecture: my object was to combat 
Pattison's statement that the extinction of 
the Pagan civilisation by the Church was a 
great calamity." 

T, — " I suspect that Pattison, if pressed, 
would have explained his words to mean 
that it is deplorable that human nature is 
such a poor thing that it cannot maintain its 
civilisation on a rational and progressive 
footing, and that it is forced from time to 
time to fall back on supernaturalism.** 

January 2gtk, 1894. — I dined with Mr. 
Gladstone. He expressed great interest in 
the customs of the Basques, and in the un- 
solved riddle of the origin of their race and 
language. Had not Scaliger satirically ex- 
claimed : ** The Basques say that they under- 
stand one another, but they lie ! " Mr. Glad- 
9 129 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

stone seemed especially taken with the 
popular myth explanatory of the high 
morality common among them: ^'The Devil 
took seven years trying to learn Basque^ and 
at last gave it up as a bad job. ' ' A saying of 
Basque origin seemed equally quaint, though 
in a different fashion: ** Our Lord promised 
to give St. Peter a horse if he would repeat 
the Lord's prayer without pause or inter- 
polation. Whereupon St. Peter began: 
* Pater noster qui es in ccelis ' — And, Lord, 
will he have a saddle? " 

Mr. Gladstone had been reading a lecture 
on the sanitary rules followed by the Jews. 
I said that I had been told that in England 
they were less long-lived than Christians. 
His impression was the other way. He said 
that they had a special immunity from tuber- 
cular disease. Reference was made to a 
quondam Professor whose too catholic antip- 
athies were especially directed against the 
Jewish race and modern Liberals; and one 
of the party reported that this Ishmael, on 
being told that the Jews had a remarkable 
immunity from cholera, drily exclaimed, 
** That is the worst thing I have heard of 
the cholera! " 

G. {smiling) — " He hates the Jews as much 
130 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

as he hates me." The genial tone of this 
remark may serve to show that Mr. Glad- 
stone was not as abnormally sensitive to 
adverse criticism as he was often said to be. 

He did not take the same high view that 
many take of the old Hebrew literature, 
regarded merely as literature. He had been 
struck by a statement of Professor Max 
Miiller to the effect that the Jewish intellect 
made a sudden start after being brought in 
contact with the Aryan intellect. (Surely 
Isaiah was an exception.) He did not think 
much of the old biblical heroes, except 
Moses. I hinted at a scepticism about Moses 
being a real person. He said that he thought 
that, if there had been no historical Moses, 
the Hebrew imagination would not have 
been equal to the task of creating one. And 
then he went off to his favourite subject. 

G. — ** Those who think it too great a 
miracle that there should have been a Homer 
who wrote both the Iliad and the Odyssey, 
are substituting for it a miracle yet greater 
and yet harder of belief." 

I remarked that, if the word a}xv}xoov really 
means ** blameless," it seems very odd that 
in the beginning of the Odyssey this epithet 
is applied to ^gisthus. He replied that 

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Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

" blameless " is a very inadequate rendering 
of the word. It may sometimes mean this; 
but sometimes also it connotes high birth ; 
** just as we apply the word * illustrious ' to 
princes — to such princes as the sons of 
George III. There are other expressions 
in Homer which we were taught to translate 
either incorrectly or in too narrow a sense ; 
for instance, at Eton, Edward Coleridge 
insisted on our translating ava^ avSp^Vy 
" king of men." 

I asked Mr. Gladstone why he had not 
ranked Rob Roy with those novels of Walter 
Scott which he placed in the first rank. He 
thought that Rob Roy and Guy Mannering 
ran them very hard. He was surprised when 
I mentioned that Lowe had ranked St, 
Ronans Well with the Bride of Lammer- 
moor. He agreed with me that this was an 
instance of the peculiar limitation which is 
so often found in men of strong individ- 
uality. I asked whether he admired Miss 
Austen much. 

G. — ** Certainly. But I am not so enthu- 
siastic about her as some people are. An 
old friend of mine, Rio (he is long since 
dead), complained that Macaulay 'can neither 
dive nor soar.' This is true of Jane Austen. 

132 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Someone said of Randolph Churchill (it was 
only true of him in his earlier days), that ' he 
was a first-rate actor in a third-rate piece.* 
This also might be said of Miss Austen." 

T. — ** Walter Scott has spoken of himself 
as successful in the bow-wow strain, while 
Miss Austen excelled in the representation 
of everyday life." 

G. — " That is Walter Scott's modest way 
of putting things. He was generosity itself. 
In all those volumes of his there is a com- 
plete absence of self-laudation. After all, 
Miss Austen was parochial, while Scott was 
world-historical — Welt-historisch, as the Ger- 
mans would say." 

I complained that some of Miss Austen's 
characters seemed to me wooden ; they con- 
trast in that way with some of Miss Ferrier's. 

G. — "Which of Miss Ferrier's have you 
read?" 

T.— ' Marriage:' 

G. — ** You should read her Inheritance, 
It is far her best. She had the great advan- 
tage of writing in the interval between 
the earlier and the later school of novel- 
ists." 

Mr. Gladstone ranked Disraeli as the 
greatest master of parliamentary wit that 

133 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

had ever been. He looked upon his char- 
acter as a great mystery, and it pained him 
to feel that the mystery will never be solved. 
He quoted Bright's remark on the repre- 
sentation of minorities: ** If the member for 
a minority dies, will the minority have the 
power of electing his successor? " This Mr. 
Gladstone thought a perfectly fair criticism, 
well expressed. He said that Disraeli dis- 
liked the idea of representation of minorities ; 
but he introduced it into his Reform Bill as 
a sop to political doctrmaires. Afterwards, 
when the House of Lords amended his Re- 
form Bill and made it practically a nominal 
measure, Disraeli threw out all their amend- 
ments with the exception of this one, which, 
though he disliked it, he thought compara- 
tively unimportant. Mr. Gladstone thought 
that the wittiest thing which Bright ever 
said was when he spoke of the party which 
formed the Cave of Adullam as being like a 
Skye terrier: " it was so covered with hair 
that you could not tell its head from its 
tail. "^ The leading members of the Cave 

^ It is well known that the christening of the party as 
" The Cave of Adullam " was also due to Bright ; but it 
is less well known that, in making the comparison, he was in 
a manner anticipated by Mr, Gladstone's favourite novelist : 
" The Baron of Bradwardine, being asked what he thought 

134 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

were Lowe and Horsman, the latter of whom 
Mr. Gladstone described as " a mere wind- 
bag." He added that Bright meant to im- 
ply that both these members uttered such 
platitudes that those of Lowe were on a par 
with those of Horsman. Mr, Gladstone 
spoke of Lowe's inability to defend him- 
self. 

G. — " The power of self-defence is im- 
planted in the meanest of all creatures (I 
don't know whether it exists in rabbits). 
But at anyrate it was absent in Lowe. He, 
who had attacked our Reform Bill so power- 
fully, was quite helpless when such an in- 
ferior man as attacked him. Dizzy 

quite cut him to pieces. In one way this 
told morally in his favour. A member of a 
Government is bound to defend his col- 
leagues as much as himself; and, as Lowe 
did not defend his colleagues, it told in his 
favour that he also did not defend him- 
self." 

of these recruits, took a long pinch of snnff, and answered 
drily, that he could not but have an excellent opinion of 
them, since they resembled precisely the followers who 
attached themselves to the good King David at the cave of 
Adullam ; videlicet^ everyone that was in distress, every- 
one that was in debt, and everyone that was discontented, 
which the Vulgate renders bitter of soul" 

135 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

The wittiest thing that Mr. Gladstone ever 
heard in Parliament was a retort of Lord 
John Russell. Sir Francis Burdett had been 
a strong Radical; and, as is well known, he 
got into trouble about it. After some years, 
he became a Conservative. Mr, Gladstone 
doubted whether his inconsistency was as 
great as it seemed to be. But at anyrate 
it brought him into opposition with his old 
colleagues. He made a rather violent speech, 
in which he said there was nothing he hated 
so much as the " cant of patriotism." Lord 
John Russell got up and said that, for him- 
self, there was one thing that he hated worse, 
and that was ** the recant of patriotism." 

The best thing said in Parliament in this 
century was, Mr. Gladstone thought, a sen- 
tence of Canning. Pitt had been a Free 
Trader; but in his later life he took a line 
which naturally made the Tories claim him 
as a Protectionist. Canning was thoroughly 
devoted to his old master, and used to say 
that his allegiance was with Pitt in his tomb. 
He said of those Protectionists who appealed 
to the authority of Pitt: "They are like 
those savages who pay no honour to the sun 
when he is in his meridian splendour, but 
who, when he is under a momentary eclipse, 

136 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

come forth with cymbals and dances to adore 
him."^ 

Canning was an adept in such rhetorical 
outbursts. Some forty years ago, I heard 
an old gentleman, in a speech at an agricul- 
tural dinner, quote with great admiration the 
following sentence which in his youth he had 
heard from Canning's own lips : — " The same 
sun which lighted Lord Wellington into 
Madrid and which grew pale at the confla- 
gration of Moscow, has yielded us the most 
luxuriant harvest that has ever blessed man- 
kind." Surely this rhetoric is overstrained. 
If it is not mere verbiage, it implies that the 
stars in their courses had fought against 
Napoleon ; and it seems to postulate such a 
belief in the anthropomorphic and anthropo- 

^ A few days later Mr. Gladstone, at my request, most 
kindly repeated his version of Canning's metaphor, and 
then let me repeat it to him ; so that my account of that 
version is certainly correct. It differs slightly from the 
ordinary version, which is as follows: "Such perverse 
worship is like the idolatory of barbarous nations, who can 
see the noonday splendour of the sun without emotion, 
but, when he is in eclipse, come forward with their hymns 
and cymbals to adore him." Mr. Gladstone's version, 
however, delivered as it was in a voice far more sonorous 
and rhetorical than was his wonted conversation, seems to 
me interesting and characteristic ; it is, as it were, Canning 
Gladstonised. 

137 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

centric — I had almost said Anglo-centric — 
government of the physical worid as is in 
nowise warranted by science. 

I reminded Mr. Gladstone of the saying 
of Burke about Warren Hastings, which 
Macaulay has thus recorded: ** It was said 
that at Benares, the very place at which the 
acts set forth in the first article of impeach- 
ment had been committed, the natives had 
erected a temple to Hastings; and this story 
excited a strong sensation in England. 
Burke's observations on the apotheosis were 
admirable. He saw no reason for astonish- 
ment, he said, in the incident which had 
been represented as so striking. He knew 
something of the mythology of the Brah- 
mins. He knew that, as they worshipped 
some gods from love, so they worshipped 
others from fear. He knew that they erected 
shrines, not only to the benignant deities of 
light and plenty, but also to the fiends who 
preside over small-pox and murder. Nor 
did he at all dispute the claim of Mr. Hast- 
ings to be admitted into such a Pantheon." 

G. — " Did Burke say that on the spur of 
the moment? " 

T. — " I do not know; but probably he 
did not." 

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Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G, — " That makes all the difference. If I 
am asked who is the greatest speaker that 
I have known in Parliament, I answer that 
it depends on what you mean by a great 
speaker. No one was equal to Bright when 
he had time to prepare a subject. But he 
was not strong as a debater, though I once 
remember his being very successful in de- 
bate. I think it was about Ireland ; but I 
am not sure. I once had an odd experience. 
It was found convenient that I, as leader of 
the party, should make a speech from 
Bright's notes. I will mention another small 
experience that I had. Ayrton was often a 
very troublesome opponent in debate. I 
remember once that at three o'clock in the 
morning he was going to attack me. I saw 
him go out of the House to eat an orange, 
and knew that probably meant an hour's 
speech. This was too much, and I beat a 
prudent retreat. As you take an interest in 
these Parliamentary reminiscences, I will 
give you another. The Conservatives ap- 
pointed Lord Glenelg to a high official posi- 
tion. He was thoroughly honourable, but 
was supposed to be inefficient, and had a 
way of falling asleep during debates. In the 
course of a very exciting debate. Brougham 

139 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

in the House of Lords expressed regret that 
he and his party had deprived the noble 
Lord of so many sleepless days. I reminded 
Brougham of this afterwards, and was glad 
to find that he had quite forgotten it. It 
showed that his wit was so abundant that he 
could afford to forget particular instances 
of it.'* 

T, — "In fact, he was, in Tennyson's 
phrase, * Like wealthy m.en who know not 
when they give.' " 

I asked Mr. Gladstone about Peel ; he did 
not seem to have left on record many witty 
sayings. 

G. — " No; Peel was not a phrase-maker, 
like Disraeli or Bright. There were two 
things especially conspicuous about him. 
One was his overmastering sense of public 
duty; this never deserted him. The other 
thing was his sense of measure. He had 
generally an exact sense of the proportion 
between one Bill, and the general policy of 
the Government ; also of the proportion be- 
tween the different parts of the same Bill; 
and of the relation in which the leaders of 
his party stood to their followers. What I 
mean by this sense of measure will be under- 
stood if I give an instance in which such tact 

140 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

was conspicuously wanting. Shortly (I think) 
after the Reform Bill, the Conservative 
leaders had got the party into a state of 
what seemed hopeless confusion. So much 
so that one night they were preparing to 
send in their resignation. Fortunately for 
them, Lord Grey made an attack on the 
party as a whole. This so irritated the fol- 
lowers that they rallied under their leaders, 
and the party held its ground." 

I asked Mr. Gladstone whether Peel was 
not very unsociable in private life. An old 
M.P. once told me that, when he dined with 
Peel, Peel used to beset him with questions, 
and to give out nothing in return. 

G.—" Quite right too. If Peel had to do 
with someone from whom useful information 
could be got, he was quite right to try and 
get it. If he was wanting in sociability, the 
reason was that his mind was too full of the 
public interest to be able to occupy itself 
with smaller matters. " 

T. — ** But surely he might have given out 
something on non-political matters ; for ex- 
ample, on literature or history." 

G, — " He sometimes did. I remember 
his praising to me Hallam as a historian. 
Also, I heard him express a low opinion of 

141 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Fox. So far as Fox's private character is 
concerned, Peel may have been right ; but, 
as a public man, Fox had certainly a remark- 
able power of grasping general principles." 

At first these examples of Peel's com- 
municativeness seemed to me conspicuous 
by their slightness; but I afterwards reflected 
that, according to Professor Goldwin Smith, 
*' For personal recollections twenty-three 
years are Lethe * ' ; and that twice that in- 
terval divided us from the point of time to 
which Mr. Gladstone was reaching back. 

Mr. Gladstone thought that there was a 
certain resemblance between Rome under 
Augustus and France under Louis Napoleon. 
I called attention to the resemblance between 
the two Caesars in their relation to one 
another, and the two Napoleons. 

G, — ** Yes. The resemblance is remark- 
able in many ways ; though Augustus was 
much wiser in his generation than Louis 
Napoleon." 

71 — *'* Was not Louis Napoleon wise in 
his generation during the earlier part of his 
career?" 

G. — ** Certainly not from the time of the 
Mexican expedition. But what I am insist- 
ing on as a point of resemblance between the 

142 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

two despots is that, while Louis Napoleon 
put down freedom of speech and of writing 
in general, he allowed a certain freedom to 
men of letters who were not likely to influ- 
ence the public. And I suspect it was the 
same sort of thing with Augustus. So long 
as Horace made a low bow to the established 
Government, he was allowed in an indirect 
way to show his sympathy with his old com- 
rades of Philippi." 

T. — ** In the one stanza, Olint Philippos^ 
there are two phrases which the admirers of 
Horace try to explain away. Turpe solum 
tetigere mento, and relicta non bene parmula. 
It is said that no Roman soldier would have 
made the latter admission. But surely he 
meant that he had been so insignificant an 
enemy, that the conquerors could afford to 
overlook his youthful folly." 

G. — ** That is what I meant by the low 
bow. I believe that Louis Napoleon was 
often indulgent to Orleanist men of letters 
who veiled their meaning." 

T. — ** Did you personally see enough of 
Louis Napoleon to form an impression of his 
ability?" 

(7.—** No. I dined with him in the Tui- 
leries. But he was most of the time cross- 

143 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

questioning me about English finance." 
(He said this with a smile which seemed to 
mean, If Louis Napoleon t litis cr oss- ex amine dy 
why should not Peel?) " The conversation 
was in English, which he spoke very well. 
I saw him again during his exile. But I 
found him then a broken man, and could 
not judge of his ability.*' 

We spoke about Froude^ and the question 
was raised whether, after all, it had been a 
mistake to confer on him the Professorship 
of History. Was not such a style as Froude's 
a supreme merit in a Professor? His facts 
might be often inaccurate; but they were 
certainly far less so than the facts introduced 
into Scott's novels; and yet Scott's novels 
are valued as carrying a picturesque concep- 
tion of the past into quarters where other- 
wise there would be no conception of it at 
all. Scott's Richard I. is more of a per- 
manent possession, more of a living person, 
than Hume's. Is it not possible that, in 
like manner, some of Froude's historical 
portraits will survive Freeman's? 

Mr. Gladstone spoke severely of the pecul- 
iar bias shown by Froude with regard to 
Henry VIII. We got on the charm of 
Froude's diction as contrasted with Grote's, 

144 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and I mentioned the substance of Charles 
Austin's comment on Grote, which is thus 
reported in Safe Studies : "He feared that 
the History of Greece lost much of its value 
through the attempt to whitewash Cleon and 
the other demagogues. He also regretted 
that Mr. Grote had bestowed so little pains 
on his style ; an inattention which seemed 
to Mr. Austin all the more strange as the 
historian was keenly alive to the grace and 
charm of the classical writings. He was 
afraid that, in consequence of these two 
defects, the history of Greece still remains 
to be written." 

Mr. Gladstone said that he had heard 
Grote find fault with the English of John 
Mill. I said that I thought that Grote may 
have been very particular in avoiding slip- 
shod sentences. 

6^.—" But are there any such sentences in 
Mill?" 

Z".— " I should think very few; but I re- 
member seeing one or two quoted by Pro- 
fessor Hodgson in his Errors in the Use of 
English,'' 

Mr. Gladstone did not seem to have heard 
of this book. I mentioned that its author 
had marshalled a long array of blunders from 
lo 145 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

various writers, great and small ; and I told 
Mr. Gladstone of two instances given by 
Hodgson of the wrong collocation of words: 
- — " Erected to the memory of John Phillips 
accidentally shot as a mark of affection by 
his brother;" and " A piano for sale by a 
lady about to cross the Channel in an oak 
case with carved legs." Mr. Gladstone 
seemed much amused by these examples. 
In reference to the general question, he 
thought that a sentence ought not to bear 
more than one construction, and he quoted 
the familiar Aio te, j^acide, Romafios vincere 
posse. 

Mr. Gladstone spoke playfully of a lady 
as his step-great-niece; and asked what I 
made of such a relation. I said in a like 
tone that, Queen Charlotte having been god- 
mother of my mother-in-law, I have some- 
times spoken of George III. as my step-god- 
grand-father-in-law. 

G. {with a smile), — *' I was going to say 
that I wished you a better step-god — I for- 
get the rest ; — but I draw a distinction. 
George III. in his private character shows to 
advantage when compared with Charles II. 
or George II. But, if George III. had suc- 
ceeded in repressing freedom and parlia- 

146 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

mentary government, we should have had 
a Revolution, not probably so bad as the 
French, but resembling it in kind. From 
such a catastrophe we were preserved by 
that unworthy representative of good prin- 
ciples, Wilkes." 

We referred to Macaulay's praise of Wil- 
liam III., and to his speaking less severely 
of William's private faults than of those of 
James II. 

G. — '* Of course it was as a public man 
that Macaulay praised William ; but I have 
no doubt that Macaulay's bias in favour of 
William extended to everything about him." 

While admiring many points in Miss Chol- 
mondeley's Diana Tempest, Mr. Gladstone 
found fault with that clever novel, first, be- 
cause he thought that a novel with an abnor- 
mal plot requires very exceptional skill ; and, 
secondly, because the authoress throws satire 
broadcast on the clergy and other representa- 
tives of tradition. He did not object to 
Robert Elsmere on this ground, because the 
orthodox Catherine is represented as narrow 
perhaps, but on the whole an ideal character. 

We spoke of the Revised Translation of 
the Bible. He said that he had advised the 
translators (or some of them) to bring out, 

147 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

at an early stage, a few specimens of their 
work and to let the critics say their say about 
them. To anyone versed in the usages of 
the House of Commons such an expedient 
would not seem unnatural. But the trans- 
lators utterly refused to suffer their unfin- 
ished work to be blown on by Xh.Q poptilaris 
or a of inexperts: ** They laughed me to 
scorn ; and the result has been that the 
Revised Version died almost at its birth." 

I think it was on this occasion that Mr. 
Gladstone made a remark to -me which has 
been treasured up in my memory. Taking 
my arm as we left the dining-room, he said, 
** Your memory makes you formidable; but 
you are so good-natured that one does not 
feel afraid of you." At first the word 
** afraid " employed by the great Statesman 
fairly took my breath away ; I felt disposed 
to say, " Quid enim contendat hirundo 
Cycnis? " But, on second thoughts, I inter- 
preted the hyperbolical compliment to mean, 
** I am sure that, if you Boswellize me, you 
will set down nought in malice." In other 
words, he more than suspected that I was 
taking notes of our conversations. It is as 
throwing light on this point that his observa- 
tion seemed to me worth recording. 

148 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

January I'^th, 1896. — Mr. and Mrs. Glad- 
stone and Mrs. Drew dined with us. 

He remarked on our being in the same 
rooms as before. 

7".-—" You see I have strong Conservative 
instincts." 

G,- — ** So have I. In all matters of cus- 
tom and tradition, even the Tories look 
upon me as the chief Conservative that is." 

T.— " Two years ago a Conservative M.P. 
spoke of you as the strongest Conservative 
influence in Parliament. This being so, I 
wondered why, in the interests of Conser- 
vatism, he did not join your party." 

Mr. Gladstone smiled and seemed pleased. 

I note, in passing, that my Conservative 
friend probably regarded Mr. Gladstone as 
the best controller and moderator of the 
political changes which have become inevit- 
able ; insomuch that the English Government 
under his guidance might be compared to 
the Athenian Government under the guid- 
ance of Pericles: "it was nominally a de- 
mocracy, but in reality the supremacy of the 
first citizen" {Xoycp /Atv drjuoxparia epyo) 
dd vno tov TtpGDTOv avdpoi apxv)- 

He spoke with high praise of Purcell's Life 
of Manning, He said it was the " history 

149 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

of a soul and the dividing of bone and mar- 
row. " He had read no biography for some 
time " which showed so much impartiahty 
and insight." I asked him what he thought 
of Manning as an orator. He said that he 
had heard some striking sermons of Man- 
ning's while Manning was still in the Church 
of England. He evidently thought much 
more highly of Newman as a master of Eng- 
lish; but he called Manning "a great Ec- 
clesiastical Statesm.an." I asked him about 
Cardinal Vaughan. 

G, — " Oh, he is an infinitel}^ smaller man. 
I am reminded of Canning's lines." ^ 

This suggested the appointment of Alfred 
Austin as successor to Alfred Tennyson. 

J". — " Was it not a pity appointing a new 
laureate? The office is now altogether some- 
thing of an anachronism; why could it not 
have a grand euthanasia in Tennyson?" 

G. — " At any rate I should have waited 
until someone of Tennyson's calibre had 
turned up. I felt a special difficulty in 
recommending a successor to Tennyson, 
because by far the greatest of our English 
poets is practically out of the running." 

* ' ' Pitt is to Addington 

As London to Paddington." 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

He went on to give reasons for this latter 
opinion, and spoke of some lines in which 
the great living poet to whom he referred 
had touched on the death of the late Czar. 
I expressed surprise that the difficulty about 
Mr. William Morris' political opinions could 
not be got over. 

G. — " Would you place him as a poet 
anywhere near Swinburne?" 

T. — " The two are so unlike that they can 
hardly be compared. But I confess that I 
admire much of the Earthly Paradise and of 
The Life and Death of Jason. ' ' 

I expressed surprise at the extremely high 
praise which Matthew Arnold and others 
bestow on Wordsworth. Mr. Gladstone re- 
plied that he was also surprised; but he 
added that he had heard that the late Sir 
Francis Doyle, whose critical faculty he 
valued highly, took the same view as Mat- 
thew Arnold. Neither Mr. Gladstone nor 
I could understand why Matthew Arnold 
ranked Wordsworth so much above Tenny- 
son. I quoted single lines of Wordsworth 
which Matthew Arnold praised highly. 
Matthew Arnold seemed to regard the line — 

" Who can tell us what she sings ? " 
and the line — 

151 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

" And never lifted up a single stone," 
as so admirable in themselves that, even 
when severed from their context, they fur- 
nish a sort of touchstone which may help us 
to discriminate between good poetry and 
bad. Would Dr. Arnold have thought so 
highly of either of these lines if they had been 
written by a Rugby boy? 

I added that Matthew Arnold speaks con- 
temptuously of Macaulay's Lays. 

G. — * * I admire the Lays very much. Tkey 
will live. 

I called Mr. Gladstone's attention to the 
extraordinary passage in which Matthew 
Arnold hazards the opinion that Shelley's 
letters may outlive his poems. Mr. Glad- 
stone seemed to agree with me that criticisms 
of this kind tend to shake one's faith in the 
critic's judgment. 

I asked Mr. Gladstone what he thought 
of Macaulay as a speaker. He gave an ac- 
count of two famous speeches of Macaulay's 
and of the effect that they produced ; but he 
admitted that it was only on very rare occa- 
sions that Macaulay achieved such results. 

I asked him whether he thought Bright 
the finest speaker he had ever heard in Parlia- 
ment. 

152 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G. — " That is very hard to answer. There 
is so much that goes to make a great orator. 
But I will say that there were certain pass- 
ages in Bright's speeches which I never heard 
equalled." 

T, — " Had not these been carefully pre- 
pared?" 

G. — " They were said to be." 
T. — " Was Peel a great orator? " 
G. — " Not at all in the same way." 
Mr. Gladstone seemed to think that Peel's 
reputation as a statesman stands somewhat 
too high. He did not remember to have 
read Mr. Thursfield's Life of Peel. But he 
had spoken to the eminent author about Sir 
Robert Peel ; and he expected that the book 
would exactly represent his own views. 

G, — " The great virtue of Peel was that 
he had such an enormous conscience. Con- 
science, they say, is a very expensive thing 
to keep. Peel certainly kept one." 

T. — ** But you will remember that Peel 
was compared (I think by Disraeli) to the 
Turkish admiral who treacherously steered 
the fleet under his command into the enemy's 
harbour; and, exaggeration apart, I suppose 
you would say that, on the two great occa- 
sions of Catholic Emancipation and Free 

153 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Trade, other men laboured and he entered 
into their labours." 

G. — " Yes. But, when he had finally made 
up his mind, he stuck to it unflinchingly. 
His great failure was in regard to Ireland. 
He thought that he could cobble up the Irish 
difficulty by endowing Maynooth and estab- 
lishing what the strong Protestants call god- 
less Colleges. In one instance he, from most 
conscientious motives, did the Irish a great 
injury. He passed the Encumbered Estates 
Act. It is fair to say that, when the cottiers 
improved their land, the old landlords did 
not tread on the heels of the improvement. 
But, after the passing of Peel's Act, when 
any land came to be sold, the buyer naturally 
wanted to get the full value of his money; 
and so the poor tenant lost all the value of 
his improvement. One thing may amuse 
you. In the new National Biography only 
fifteen pages are given to Peel, and twenty 
pages to Parnell. " 

T. — ** You once told me that Parnell's 
speeches reminded you of Lord Palmerston's 
in their way of expressing exactly what the 
speaker meant to say. But of course you 
would call Parnell a pigmy compared with 
Lord Palmerston." 

154 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G. — " I should not call him anything of 
the sort. He had statesmanlike qualities; 
and I found him a wonderfully good man to 
do business with, until I discovered him 
to be a consummate liar." 

T. — " What sort of a place, then, would 
you assign to Lord Palmerston? " 

G. — " Taking our former standard of meas- 
urement, I should say that, if Peel has fifteen 
pages of the Biography, Palmerston should 
have ten or twelve. Palmerston had two 
admirable qualities. He had an intense love 
of Constitutional freedom everywhere; and 
he had a profound hatred of negro slavery. 
One signal service he rendered to Ireland. 
He appointed the * Devon Commission,* 
which collected facts proving the Irish to 
be the most oppressed, the most miserable 
and the most patient population in Europe. 
But he did not make any practical use of 
this knowledge. I should not ascribe to him 
the overpowering conscientiousness which I 
ascribe to Peel." 

I quoted as accurately as I could the pass- 
age in Bacon's essay " Of Goodness, and 
Goodness of Nature, ' ' in which, after describ- 
ing certain not very benevolent or trust- 
worthy characters, he says of them: " Such 

155 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

dispositions are the very errors of human 
nature ; and yet they are the fittest timber 
to make great politicks of; like to knee tim- 
ber, that is good for ships that are ordained 
to be tossed, but not for building houses that 
shall stand firm." I suggested that in this 
passage absolute honesty is recommended to 
ordinary men, but that a certain amount of 
dissimulation is conceded to statesmen. 
Does not this recall Tacitus's remark on 
Galba's refusal to temporise? To that high 
standard, he tells us, jam non pares sumus. 

G. — ** It is only with great hesitation that 
I should differ from anything that Bacon 
says in those Essays of his. But surely knee 
timber is not a thing which bends as an un- 
scrupulous man's conscience bends. It is 
chosen because it is in the shape best suited 
to ships." 

T. — " I suppose that Bacon meant that it 
is naturally crooked, just as some men's 
consciences are naturally crooked." 

G. — " Well, I should not say this of 
Palmerston's conscience. An illustration 
will best show the fault that I find with 
him. When the troubles were arising be- 
tween Prussia and Denmark, Palmerston 
said that, if the Danes were attacked, they 

156 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

would not stand alone. They were attacked ; 
they did stand alone ; and Palmerston did 
not resign." 

T. — '* Of course, when he said that, he 
thought that the cause of Denmark would 
be warmly supported by England." 

G. — * * He had no business to think. There 
was an Eaton master, named Heath, who 
had an odd sort of dry humour. When he 
was going to send a boy up to be flogged, 
and the boy began to make excuses, saying 
* I thought so-and-so,' he used to say, * No 
boy has any business to think until he gets 
to the Upper Division.' And so Palmerston 
had no business to think until he had learnt 
what the country was prepared to do." ^ 

Something was said about flogging in 
public schools ; and I told the story of how 
Dr. Vaughan was once flogging a young 
nobleman, who, not being used to such 
rough treatment, presently got up and asked 
the headmaster how many more cuts he was 
going to give. Vaughan replied in his most 

^ This may recall a passage in The Rivals : — 

Lydia. — " Madam, I thought you once " — 

Mrs. Malaprop. — " You thought, Miss ! I don't 

know any business you have to think at all — thought does 

not become a young woman. " 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

mellifluous voice, " That is for me to decide, 
Lord F. ; kneel down again." A lady told 
the story of an assistant master sending 
Keate a list of boys to be confirmed. Keate 
thought they were to be flogged, and flogged 
them accordingly. I called Mr. Gladstone's 
attention to the phrase he had used, ** dry- 
humour," remarking that, according to the 
etymology, it would signify dry-wetness. 
Wishing to draw him out about wit and 
humour, I mentioned that Matthew Arnold 
says that Moli^re ought to be ranked with 
Shakespeare, Milton, and Goethe. 

G. — " Does he indeed say that? I should 
not call Moliere a poet." 

T. — *' I once expressed some surprise to 

our friend J ■ M at so high a place 

being assigned to Moliere; but he agreed 
with Matthew Arnold. He said that Mo- 
liere had written two plays, which fell only 
just below the greatest dramas of the world ; 
and he also spoke very highly of U Avare^ 
and also praised the Boiirgois Gentilho^mne," 

G. — ** Well, I suppose that the Misan- 
thrope and the Tartuffe were the two great 
plays that he meant. I have been reading 
them lately, and I should call them both 
third-class plays. I once asked Dollinger 

158 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

whom he considered the two wittiest men 
that ever lived. He at once answered, 
* Aristophanes and Shakespeare.* This is 
just what I should have said myself. I am 
very old now, and cannot hope to learn 
much more. But I do want to learn what 
the difference is, which people are so fond 
of talking about, between wit and humour." 

I quoted Jowett's saying {Memoir, p. 32) 
that wit consists in a number of points, while 
humour is continuous. 

G, " I don't see how he would have 

applied that to individual cases. One of 
the best things ever said was the remark 
of Falstaff, who, being called on to pay for 
the satin which he had purchased, said that 
Bardolph should be his surety.^ Was this 
wit or humour? " 

T. " At any rate, there can be no doubt 

that most of Sidney Smith's good sayings 
were witty rather than humorous. Take 
the familiar example of the young lady who 
said to him, * We want to bring this pea to 
perfection ' ; Sidney Smith, giving her his 

^ The reference is to Henry IV., Part II. Act i. Scene 2.. 
But I failed to detect in this scene any quotable passage 
which would not disappoint my readers, after the praise 
bestowed by Mr. Gladstone. 

159 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

arm, replied, ' Let me bring perfection to 
the pea.' " 

G. — * ' Yes, that was wit. By the way, I am 
told that one of the Pollocks was the author 
of a saying which I had always supposed to 
be by Sidney Smith — the saying addressed 
to the child who tried to please the tortoise 
by stroking its shell: * You might as well 
stroke the Dome of St. Paul's to please the 
Dean and Chapter. ' The Y\t\\^ gamins some- 
times say very good things. Someone who 
applied to us for a clerkship told us that he 
had already applied to become a clerk to an 
undertaker in Fetter Lane — not a very lively 
occupation. But what can have been his 
feelings when, on going to the office, he 
found two hundred other applicants? But 
the unkindest cut of all was when he saw 
two small gamins pointing at them, and say- 
ing, * Look at all those clerks; they are go- 
ing there to be measured for their coffins.' 
I will give you another instance. A very 
tall friend of mine was staring up at the 
Obelisk. He heard one of the gamins say, 
* If you were to lie on the ground, you would 
be half-way home.' " 

T. — " I know a case of a very tall, gaunt, 
and plain English lady in Spain, to whom a 

i6o 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

rude little Spanish boy said, * You are as 
long and as ugly as a lawsuit.' " 

May not, I am tempted to ask, the differ- 
ence between wit and humour be illustrated 
by Sidney Smith's definition of wit? " The 
feeling of wit," he says, " is occasioned by 
those relations of ideas which excite surprise, 
and surprise alone." Now, it is manifest 
that the limitation contained in this last 
clause would not be required in a definition 
of humour. Nay, it represents the very 
opposite of what is required in such a defini- 
tion. The emotional quality which (accord- 
ing to Sidney Smith) wit lacks, all humour 
must possess. Why, then, should not hu- 
mour be defined as Wit touched by emotion ? 

The conversation drifted to English litera- 
ture. 

T.—'' I find it hard to think that Carlyle's 
extreme popularity will last very long." 

G, {smiling)—'' I find it hard to be impar- 
tial; for Carlyle did not at all like me." 

J".—" Also, he did not at all like Disraeli, 
at least before Disraeli offered him a knight- 
hood." 

G,—"" Yes, I know that he did not like 
Dizzy ; but, with regard to myself, the hard 
thing was that I had a long, interesting, and, 
II i6i 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

as it seemed to me, amicable conversation 
with him at Mentone; and then, to my 
amazement, I found, when Froude's life of 
him came out, this very conversation is men- 
tioned in it, and I am described as utterly 
contemptible and impermeable to new ideas. 
I don't look upon Carlyle as a philosopher. 
Tennyson once said to me a very good thing 
about him. He said, * Carlyle is a poet, to 

whom Nature has denied the faculty of 

» » > 
verse. 

T. — " This reminds me of what Tennyson 
said to a friend of mine about Walt Whit- 
man. He said, ' The first requisite of a 
singer is that he should sing. Walt Whit- 
man has not this requisite ; let him speak in 
prose.' " 

G. — -** Does not this seem rather incon- 
sistent with what he said to me? " 

T, — ** I think not. He seemingly regarded 
both Carlyle and Walt Whitman as poetical 
torsos, as poets without the faculty of verse. 
This being so, he blamed Walt W^hitman for 
attempting verse. He would doubtless have 
commended Carlyle for never (or hardly 
ever) attempting it." 

G. — ** Are you a great admirer of Car- 
lyle?" 

162 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

T. — " At Harrow I became a great ad- 
mirer of Macaulay's directness and plainness, 
and I often wish that Carlyle would not write 
Carlylese." 

G. {smiling)—' I suppose that it is hardly 
possible for the same man to be a great ad- 
mirer both of Macaulay and of Carlyle." 

The conversation passed on to politics. 

T, — " I don't want to embark on too wide 
a subject; but I am tempted to ask in the 
words of Jehoram, ' Is it peace, Jehu?' In 
other words, are you at all afraid of war, 
especially with Germany? " 

G,— ' Not in the least." 

T. — '* Are you not afraid of our small 
army being attacked by their huge army?" 

Q^ — '* How are they to cross the Chan- 
nel without ships? They would get very 
wet ! ' ' 

Mrs. T.—'' Might they not use a great 
number of the German Lloyd steamers to 
transport their army? " 

(7. — '* We should have twenty ships to 

their one." 

7; — " I suppose that some English com- 
panies might be induced to supply them 
with ships and arms." 

G,— ' Oh yes. For filthy lucre they 
163 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

would supply arms to the rebel angels against 
Heaven." 

T, — " This reminds me of the case of the 
Alabama.'* 

G. — '* The case of the Alabama is a very 
difficult and complicated one." 

T. — " I suppose that you consider the 
award was extravagantly high. " 

G. — "It was enormous." 

He went on to mention, if I understood 
him rightly, a case in which we were mulcted 
of a large sum through the act of one of our 
colonies. 

T. — " What a strong view Froude takes 
in Oceana about the importance of colonies 
to the Mother Country! " 

G. — " What reason does he give? " 

T. — " I think he says that in England the 
race tends to become enfeebled through be- 
ing crowded into large towns. He wishes 
more and more emigrants to be sent off to 
Australia and the other colonies, so that 
they or their posterity may return with re- 
cruited vigour to do service in England." 

G, — ** Does he propose bringing another 
Australia into being? The conditions which 
he seems to have desired exist already, and 
I cannot see how he expected to improve 

164 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

them. No, I have always maintained that 
we are bound by ties of honour and con- 
science to our colonies. But the idea that 
the colonies add to the strength of the 
mother country appears to me to be as 
dark a superstition as any that existed in 
the Middle Ages." 

It may not be amiss to compare this with 
a remark made in conversation many years 
ago by the late editor of the Times (Mr. 
Chenery) in regard to the colonies: " They 
are not feeders, but suckers." 

In justice to Froude I feel bound to say 
that I understand his contention to be that 
the colonies must be made to feel that the 
mother country really regards them as her 
children, and that she opens her doors to 
them, and is willing (in Academic phrase) 
to grant to those who distinguish themselves 
an ad iundefn degree on her own soil ; and 
that, this being clearly understood, the tie 
between mother country and colonies will 
gradually become closer, especially as quick- 
ened locomotion cuts short distance. 

Later on, when Mr. Gladstone and I were 
left alone, he called my attention to the 
question raised in my Memoir of Jowett as 
to whether Socrates had much sense of sin. 

i6S 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

T, — " Do you remember the passage at 
the end of the Republic where Socrates speaks 
of the tremendous and seemingly everlasting 
punishments which await tyrants in the other 
world? Does this not show that he had a 
strong sense of the heinousness of their 
sms? 

G. — ** I do not doubt that Socrates felt 
strongly the obligation of his moral code. 
But he regarded vice and crimes as offences 
against the social order, rather than as 
infractions of a law given by God. Of sin, 
in the latter sense, I think that there is no 
trace in Plato ; and I am confident that there 
is none in Aristotle. Even the moral code 
of the Greeks in the time of Socrates was so 
elastic as to press very gently on the vice 
mentioned in the Symposium.'' 

T. — ** It is certainly strange that there is 
nothing about that vice in Homer." 

G. — "Yes; Homer had some remains of 
the sense of sin in his araaBaXirf. But 
among the Greeks this sense of sin almost 
died out with Homer." 

I recalled the declaration of ^Eschylus, 
which gathers solemnity from its very vague- 
ness, and to which no translation can do 
justice — the half indignant, half incredulous 

i66 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

declaration or admission that ** someone 
denied" that the gods take any heed of 
mortals; and I asked whether -^schylus 
had not a deep sense, if not of sin, at any 
rate of the appalling seriousness of human 
life. 

G. — " Yes, there are some remains of the 
sense of sin in .^schylus. In Homer the 
Eumenides are passionless beings dispensing 
impartial justice. In later times they are 
Furies inflamed by the worst passions. 
Take, for example, the phrase: Atra flagel- 
lum Tisiphone qiiatit exult ans. In ^schylus 
you have both conceptions together." 

I could not agree with him in thinking 
the Homerica gods by any means models 
of virtue. An example is furnished by the 
fight of the gods, and the attitude taken by 
the Supreme Father — 

[ " Jove as his sport the dreadful scene descries, 
And views contending gods with careless eyes." 

In this couplet, it should be added. Pope 
has hardly done justice to the frank and 
refreshing brutality of the original, where 
the spiteful amusement of the Deity seems 
to be taken as a matter of course — 

** hyEXa66i ds oi (piXov rjrop 
yrfBodvvy o9' oparo Beovi eptSi dvviovraiy 

167 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

May not, after all, this divine or diabolic 
mirth have been flavoured with a Chauvin- 
istic ingredient — with the sweet but unwhole- 
some condiment of Dividantur et imperabo? 

Mr. Gladstone went on to say that, among 
the Hebrews in the time of Christ, the belief 
in the heinousness of sin had struck as deep 
root as the belief in the Unity of God; 
Christ himself did not insist on it, because 
He knew that His hearers did not dispute it. 

On the general question I offered this 
comment: " I quite feel that the word * sin,* 
in the theological sense, implies the infrac- 
tion of a divine law. But is not this word, 
like some other theological terms (such as 
inspiration), gradually modifying its mean- 
ing? The distinction that we now want to 
mark, is the distinction between persons 
who have, and persons who have not, a 
strong capacity for righteous indignation. 
This capacity is not always coincident with 
a sense of sin (strictly so called). Rabelais, 
Montaigne, Shakespeare, Moliere, and La 
Fontaine probably believed — they certainly 
professed to believe — in the delivery of the 
law from Sinai. On the other hand, Vol- 
taire, the two Mills, Mr. Francis Newman 
and Mr. John Morley have rejected that be- 

i68 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

lief; and yet, strange to say, the capacity 
for righteous indignation is far stronger in 
them than in the earlier writers whom I have 
named ; and therefore, I should say that, in 
the modern acceptation of the term, they 
have a stronger sense of the heinousness 

sm. 

In connection with this subject I called 
Mr. Gladstone's attention to a tremendous 
passage in Newman's Apologia. * * The Cath- 
olic Church holds it better for the sun and 
moon to drop from heaven, for the earth to 
fail, and for all the many millions on it to die 
of starvation in extremest agony, as far as 
temporal affliction goes, than that one soul, 
I will not say, should be lost, but should 
commit one venal sin, should tell one wilful 
untruth, or should steal one poor farthing 
without excuse." Commenting on this ex- 
tract, I admitted that Newman's view might 
be defended by very plausible arguments; 
but I could not forbear testing it by a 
homely example. Suppose that a boy, from 
sheer love of mischief, told his parents falsely 
that his sister had been drowned. On dis- 
covering the falsehood, the parents would 
doubtless punish the boy well ; but in their 
hearts they would rejoice. In other words, 

169 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

they would prefer that a small sin should 
have been committed, rather than that a 
calamity should occur which would be as 
dust in the balance when compared with the 
calamity imagined by Newman. Would not 
even Newman himself have sympathised 
with such parents in their sense of relief? 
Mr. Gladstone made no comment on what 
I urged, probably thinking that the interval 
between our respective standpoints was too 
wide to be bridged over by argument. But 
he helped on the discussion in another way. 
He gave me the extract (having himself most 
kindly copied it out) from Sir Henry Tay- 
lor's Correspondence, which he had mentioned 
to me in a former conversation as ascribing 
to Walter Scott a somewhat blunted capacity 
for moral indignation. The passage occurs 
in a letter: — " The defect which you men- 
tion is attributable to the defect of moral 
force in Scott's character; invariable can- 
dour and moderation in judging men is gen- 
erally accompanied by such a defect. Scott 
seems to be always disposed to approve of 
rectitude of conduct, and to acquiesce in the 
general rules of morality, but without any 
instinctive or unconquerable aversion from 
vice — witness his friendship for Byron. 

170 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Power of the imagination in conceiving and 
depicting strongly a great variety of char- 
acters seems scarcely compatible with a 
strong individuality of character in the per- 
son possessing that power. It is some sim- 
ple, headstrong qualities which make a strong 
character. Universality of opinions, and 
especially of sympathies, the one generally 
arising out of extended knowledge, the other 
out of the poetic sensibilities, are compatible 
enough with the power of conceiving a strong 
character, but not with that of being it." 
Mr. Gladstone added this comment: " Scott 
is one of my idols; but I cannot deny that 
there is force and depth in Taylor's doctrine. 
It is probably the only hard thing that can 
be, and has to be, said of Scott with truth. 
With this drawback, he was a great bene- 
factor to mankind." 

I could not forbear replying, " I own that 
Taylor seems to me hard on Scott. I can- 
not ascribe moral weakness to one who un- 
derwent such sacrifices, in order to pay off 
his creditors. As to his deficiency in the 
power of moral indignation, is not this found 
in almost all persons who write novels, or 
indeed who contemplate human nature from 
the outside? I could no more reproach such 

171 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

persons with taking an indulgent view of 
the moral infirmities of our poor human 
nature than I could blame a surgeon for 
guarding himself against feeling excessive 
sympathy for his patients, and for taking 
what is called d^professional view of even the 
gravest disorders." And, in confirmation 
of my opinion, I called Mr. Gladstone's 
attention to a passage which tends to show 
that biographers as well as novelists are apt 
to take a professional view of moral short- 
comings. The passage occurs in Plutarch's 
Lives of Agis and Cleomenes^ where, after 
making mention of the extraordinary moral 
lapse which dishonoured the old age of 
Aratus, the biographer goes on to say: 
" This that we have written of Aratus (who 
was indued with many noble virtues, and a 
worthy Grsecian) is not so much to accuse 
him, as to make us to see the frayelty and 
weakenes of man's nature : the which, though 
it have never so excellent vertues, can not 
yet bring forth such perfit frute, but that it 
hath ever some mayme and bleamishe." 
{North's Plutarch.) 

Going back to Homer, Mr. Gladstone con- 
tended that in the Iliad the Greeks were never 
charged with doing anything very wrong. 

172 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

T. — ** What do you say of the vindictive- 
ness of Achilles? " 

Mr. Gladstone went through the story of 
Achilles from the beginning, and thought 
that Hector might have procured the res- 
toration of Helen. 

G. — " The Greeks were finer characters 
than even some of the Hebrew patriarchs. 
They would never have consented to such 
an act as the selling of Joseph to the Egyp- 
tians. Homer marks his strong disapproval 
of the abduction of Helen by using the 
word rjpTtaaav.'" 

T. — ** You will remember that Herodotus 
uses the same word, and yet he thought that 
the Greeks were altogether in the wrong. ' * 

Mr. Gladstone seemed surprised, so I 
quoted in the original the passage, which 
says of such women as Helen: ** It is plain 
that, if they had not wished it, they would 
not have been carried oflF," remarking that 
this sentence seemed to me very quaint. 

G, — ** Yes, of course, she consented to 
some extent, as is shown by the deep con- 
trition which she expresses in the Odyssey. 
But was she worse that Bathsheba? " 

Referring to ^\xt\er' s Analogy , he said that 
he thought Dr. James Martineau had, in 

173 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

some respect, unconsciously misrepresented 
Butler. I replied that Jowett is reported to 
have described Butler's work as a " tissue of 
false analogies " ; and I quoted what he had 
said to me, namely, that he recoiled from the 
notion of attributing to a deliberate judicial 
act of the Deity moral anomalies similar to 
those which may be inseparable from the 
scheme of nature. Mr. Gladstone could not 
at all see the point of Jowett's objection. 
He said that there was one ** audacious" 
passage in which Butler seemed to hint that 
this world may have been made as nearly 
perfect as the necessity of things permit- 
ted. 

Something was said of the contemptuous 
way in which most Catholics seemed to 
regard Anglo-Catholics. Mr. Gladstone men- 
tioned a Catholic Peer who compared Ritual- 
ism to mock-turtle, and who added that he 
preferred the real turtle. I rejoined that the 
antipathy felt by Romanists for what they 
regard as the sham Rome on the banks of 
the Isis reminds me of the pathetic melan- 
choly with which Claudian contemplated the 
new Rome on the shores of the Bosphorus — 

** Cum subiit par Roma mihi, divisaque sumpsit 
^quales Aurora togas." 

174 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Mr. Gladstone seemed to like this com- 
parison. 

Reverting to the Life of Manning, Mr. 
Gladstone expressed surprise that the Car- 
dinal had said that at Harrow he had learnt 
many things imperfectly ; and Mr. Gladstone 
added the amazing statement that, when he 
was at Eton, it was possible either to learn 
or not to learn, but that, if you learnt at all, 
you had to learn thoroughly. He wished 
that a good life of Busby could be written. 
It was of Busby that the story was told that 
he begged to be excused from uncovering 
before Charles II., because if the boys once 
saw him owning his inferiority to mortal 
man, they would lose all respect for him. 

G. — " He seems to have been the parent 
of our public schools system ; and, if that 
system were removed, it would be like knock- 
ing a front tooth out of our English social 
life. I am glad to have been at Eaton, and 
especially to have been there under Keate. 
Keate was a very short man, and was con- 
scious of thus being at a disadvantage in 
inspiring the boys with awe. He resorted 
to two expedients for counteracting this 
defect. First, he wore a cassock and flow- 
ing robes ; and, secondly, he gave the boys 

175 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the impression of always being in a pas- 
sion." 

With Mr. Gladstone's description of Keate 
it may be worth while to compare that given 
by Kinglake: — 

" Anybody without the least notion of drawing 
could still draw a speaking, nay scolding, likeness of 
Keate. If you had no pencil, you could draw him 
well enough with the poker, or the leg of a chair, or 
the smoke of a candle. He was little more (if more 
at all) than five feet in height, and was not very 
great in girth, but within this space was concentrated 
the pluck of ten battalions. He had a really noble 
voice, and this he could modulate with great skill ; 
but he had also the power of quacking like an angry 
duck, and he almost always adopted this mode of 
communication in order to inspire respect. He was 
a capital scholar, but his ingenuous learning had not 
'softened his manners,' and had ' permitted them to 
be fierce' — tremendously fierce. He had such a 
complete command over his temper — I mean, over 
his g'ood temper, that he scarcely ever allowed it to 
appear : you could not put him out of humour — that 
is, out of the ///-humour which he thought to be fit- 
ting for a head-master. His red shaggy eyebrows 
were so prominent, that he habitually used them as 
arms and hands for the purpose of pointing out any 
object towards which he wished to direct attention ; 
the rest of his features were equally striking in their 
way, and were all and all his own. He wore a fancy 
dress, partly resembling the costume of Napoleon, 

176 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and partly that of a widow woman. I could not 
have named anybody more decidedly differing in 
appearance from the rest of the human race." 

I quoted Vaughan's sa3nng (reported to 
me on direct authority), viz. that it was a 
great advantage to him as a schoolmaster 
that, when he was most angry with a boy, 
he seemed most calm and self-possessed. 

G, — " There was one excellent institution 
at Eaton in my time. About once a week 
Keate summoned the boys and gave them a 
lecture about things in general. Whenever 
they were displeased they called out * 00, 
00, 00,' without moving their lips, so that 
Keate could not tell which boys were mak- 
ing the noise. There was something Homeric 
in this. When the Trojans murmured, it is 
said that they KeXadrfday^ whereas Homer 
applies a more respectful word to the ap- 
plause of the Achseans." 

He did not say whether the choice of these 
words, as of some of the Homeric epithets, 
may not have been due to the exigencies of 
metre. 

G, — ** I am sorry to learn that this good 
old Eton custom has died out." 

T.—** Vaughan would certainly not have 
tolerated it at Harrow." 
12 177 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G. — " What could he have done? If he 
had left off giving the lectures, it would have 
been a triumph for the boys." 

T, — " He sometimes deprived the whole 
school of a half-holiday for less offences than 
that. By the way, the compliment you paid 
to Busby startled me. Do you not consider 
Arnold the great reformer of modern public 
schools?" 

G, — ** I doubt whether much of his influ- 
ence reached Eton. I consider the three 
men who have recently done most for the 
religious improvement of Eton to have been 
Hawtrey, Selwyn (afterwards the well-known 
bishop), and the Duke of Newcastle, who 
founded the Newcastle Scholarship." 

T. — " How has the Newcastle Scholarship 
promoted the religious improvement of 
Eton?" 

G, — ** There are some divinity questions; 
and the competition stimulates the candi- 
dates to learn the rudiments of theology in 
a way in which they would not learn them 
otherwise." 

Jan. iSt/i. — Mr. Gladstone came to tea. 
G. — ** In my younger days I was a great 
deal in Scotland, and looked upon Presby- 

178 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

terianism as of all religions the least suscept- 
ible of change. But all is now different. 
The Free Church has taken up the traditions 
of Presbyterianism, and indirectly, if it has 
not devitalised the Established Kirk, has at 
least deprived it of some of its essential 
characteristics. The Established Kirk is in 
some particulars approaching the Church of 
England. I believe that its congregations 
sometimes sing Newman's hymn, ** Lead, 
kindly Light," which would have been 
Anathema in my youth ; and there is even 
some talk of their having bishops." 

In illustration of the state of opinion that 
prevailed in Scotland during his youth or 
middle life, he mentioned that in a Scotch 
town (I think Perth) he once saw a proces- 
sion of choristers, and had the curiosity to 
ask another Scotch boy what those boys 
were. ** They are Puseyites." ** And what 
are Puseyites?" ** Next door to Papists." 
I told the story that in my younger days a 
captain of militia, when enlisting a recruit, 
asked what was his religion. ** Are you a 
Protestant?" ** Noa." "Then are you a 
Catholic ? " * * Noa. " " Then what the devil 
are you? — Are you a heathen?" ** Noa, 
Tm a Puseyite." The captain, after ascer- 

179 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

taining what this latter term meant, decided 
that he should be sent to the Catholic service 
in the morning, and to the Protestant in the 
afternoon. 

G. {laughing) — ** Was that in England?" 

T. — '*Yes; in Chester. The story was 
told me at the time by one of the captains." 

Mr. Gladstone spoke a good deal about 
Manning, whom he regarded with very mixed 
feelings. He still had the remains of an 
ardent personal affection for the Cardinal, 
and an admiration for his statesmanlike 
abilities. But the feelings were tempered 
by a dislike of his policy, and (as he ex- 
pressed it) of his " craft." He had the 
strongest aversion to the Ultramontane 
movement. I said that a Catholic priest of 
liberal tendencies rejoiced at the decree of 
the Vatican Council in 1870, on the ground 
seemingly that the Pope — that is, the Church 
— is now released from the trammels of the 
past, and can embark on a career of progress. 

G. — " That means that he prefers personal 
to constitutional authority. Would he have 
liked the government of the Tudors better 
than the government of the Plantagenets? " 

Personally, I should have thought that, if 
compelled to choose between living under 

180 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the Plantagenets on the one hand, and, on 
the other hand, living either at the beginning 
of the reign of Henry Vll. or at the end of 
the reign of Elizabeth, — that is, during those 
portions of the Tudor regiine which were 
comparatively exempt from religious trou- 
bles, — most of us would have given a decided 
preference to the England of the Tudors. 

At the risk of appearing at once cynical 
and captious, I will offer another comment 
on the opinion expressed by Mr. Gladstone. 
In our view of nations, as of individuals of 
all sorts, it is not alwa3^s by their periods 
of perfect sanity and soundness that we are 
most attracted. Assuredly the aloe is not 
in a healthy state when it flowers, any more 
than is the legendary swan when it sings. 
But I had rather contemplate either of those 
living things in its brief moribund glory, 
than during its protracted spell of salubrious 
dulness. And, for a like reason, I feel a 
greater interest in the Roman Republic as 
it was in the age of Cicero and of Lucretius, 
than as it was in the robuster epoch of Scipio 
and of Fabius ; thus, too, mutatis mutandis^ 
even were I to grant all that Mr. Gladstone 
claimed for the orderly sway of the Planta- 
genets, I should still be more drawn towards 

i8i 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the England of Shakespeare, and of Raleigh, 
even than towards the England of Chaucer. 

I mentioned a fact related by the aforesaid 
priest, and quoted in my Memoir of Jowett. 
It is there stated (p. 27) that the priest wrote 
to me: — 

** Did I ever tell you of a saying of Car- 
dinal Manning on the hell question? A 
friend suggesting that it was a place of eter- 
nal suffering eternally untenanted, he an- 
swered : * If one did not hope that it was so, 
who could endure life ? ' " According to this 
ingenious theory, impenitent sinners are in- 
directly suggestive of Dryden's hind; for 
they are doomed to hell, but fated not to burn. 
But Mr. Gladstone did not see his way either 
to granting them an escape from the nether 
fires, or to investing them with the insensi- 
bility of the salamander. And indeed, when 
the Cardinal's merciful special pleading was 
reported to him, he emphatically replied that 
the report seemed to him hard to believe. 
He went on to speak of an article which he 
had written about Butler's chapter on a 
future life. He had no sympathy with the 
belief in natural immortality. That belief, 
he contended, was upheld only by Plato and 
a few other philosophers in pagan times. It 

182 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

is nowhere to be found in the Bible; and 
Origen was, he believed, the earliest Chris- 
tian writer who adopted it; afterwards it 
became so widespread, if not universal, that 
Servetus, when accused, amongst other 
things, of the heresy of attacking that be- 
lief, openly declared: ** If ever I said that, 
and not only said it, but published it, and 
infected the whole world, I would condemn 
myself to death." 

G. — " Do you believe in natural immor- 
tality?" 

T. — " I certainly wish to believe it. I am 
naturally disposed in favour of any form of 
the belief in immortality which does not 
involve the belief in final retribution." 

G. — ** But the belief in natural immor- 
tality is not inconsistent with the belief in 
final retribution." 

In strict theory, I suppose that he was 
right. But, practically, the scientific objec- 
tions to the belief in natural immortality are 
so formidable that this belief is obliged in 
self-defence to throw itself, as it were, on 
our highest aspirations; and those aspira- 
tions undoubtedly point to the elevating 
hope that good will be the final goal of ill. 
Probably Lord Sherbrooke had some such 

183 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

thought in his mind when he said, in con- 
versation, *' I utterly refuse to believe in a 
God who is worse than I am." Whereto 
he might have added as a corollary: " I 
utterly refuse to believe in a future life 
which is worse than the present life." Yes j 
this is the universal postulate of enlightened 
theology : De Diis nil nisi bonum. 

Wishing to see what Mr. Gladstone would 
make of the obvious objections to the belief 
in personal immortality, I expounded them 
as clearly as I could ; and, with that view, 
I gave him the substance of a conversation 
which had taken place between Professor 
Tyndall and myself, and which has so much 
intrinsic interest that I will venture to repeat 
it here : — 

In 1886 (or thereabouts) I remarked to Professor 
Tyndall that Dr. Maudsley somewhere speaks of Mind 
as "a function of brain, or rather of organisation." 
" Do you suppose," Tyndall asked, laughing, " that 
Maudsley is the only man who says that ? " He 
clearly regarded the point as one on which rational 
biologists are agreed. I then inquired whether he 
did not find it hard to reconcile this opinion with the 
belief in immortality. " If the brain is the organ, 
and consciousness is merely the function, is it not 
contrary to all analogy to expect that, in this instance, 
the function will outlast the organ r Is it not like 

184 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

imagining that the fire will go on burning when the 
fuel is exhausted ? Huxley would doubtless agree 
with you on the general principle ; and therefore I 
am puzzled to find him taking a purely Agnostic at- 
titude on the question. He says, in effect, that, if 
people tell him that they believe in immortality, he 
asks them on what they ground their belief; and, if 
they tell him that they disbelieve in it, he asks them 
on what they ground their disbelief." In reply, Tyn- 
dall took exception to my illustration drawn from 
fire and fuel. He said that there is no evidence that 
consciousness, like heat or electricity, is a mode of 
motion ; but he spoke of consciousness as "depend- 
ent " on organisation. 

Tol.—" Does not the word ' dependent ' involve 
the whole issue ? " 

Tyn, {after a pause)—'* Do you suppose that, if 
Huxley had been in this room now, and you had 
pressed him as you have pressed me, he would seri- 
ously maintain that the balance lies evenly between 
the two opposite hypotheses ? " 

He went on to make it quite clear that, in his 
opinion, the view of Lucretius that 

" animi natura nequit sine corpore oriri 

Sola, neque a nervis et sanguine longiter esse," 

is in all probability correct. Presently Tyndall 
added, with a smile, " Huxley does sometimes throw 
sops to Cerberus "—meaning, doubtless, that this 
economy of truth or economy of logic, was practised 
unconsciously. That such a comment should have 
been made by Tyndall, even playfully, on his ad- 
mired and admirable friend, will surprise some 

185 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

readers more, perhaps, than it surprised me. In ex- 
planation of what he said, I will add that, long be- 
fore this conversation had taken place, and indeed 
shortly after Huxley had published his essay on 
" Administrative Nihilism," I called Tyndall's atten- 
tion to one or two of Huxley's unexpected utterances, 
utterances which, though certainly not orthodox, had 
something dogmatically and aggressively anti-ma- 
terialistic in their tone. " His mind," replied Tyn- 
dall, " is a pendulum which has been going into one 
extreme, and now inclines towards the opposite one." 

After hearing what I had to say, Mr. 
Gladstone expressed strong disagreement 
with Tyndall. *' Scientific men," he ex- 
claimed, " talk a great deal too confidently 
about many points ; and this is one of them. ' ' 
When I insisted that, according to Tyndall, 
mind is a function of the brain, just as sight 
is the function of the eye, he interrupted 
me: " I beg your pardon, sight is not the 
function of the eye." 

7". — " At anyrate, you will admit that 
the eye is the organ of sight." 

G. — ** Strictly speaking, the eye is the 
carrier of sight." I confess that this objec- 
tion of his seemed to me very hypercritical, 
all the more so because, so far as it goes, it 
rather strengthens than weakens the case 
for what is called Materialism. Let us grant 

i86 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

that the brain is the organ of sight, and that 
the eye is the mere servant of the brain. 
The decomposition of the eye extinguishes 
sight. What vital function, then, will be 
left when the brain is decomposed? To 
speak broadly: If the death of the servant 
puts a stop to his peculiar form of service, 
what form of service would be possible when 
the master and all the servants have perished 
together? I was casting about for some 
safer topic when, suddenly remembering 
what had recently passed between us about 
wit and humour, I stumbled on the highly 
original observation that Charles Lamb 
seemed to me humorous rather than witty! 
But Mr. Gladstone, of course, held the rud- 
der; and, after drily assenting to what may 
be termed my leading platitude, he turned 
our course away from the smooth water and 
steered straight towards the Day of Judg- 
ment. He began by saying that the Chris- 
tian doctrine of immortality was that of 
union with God ; and, by way of illustration, 
he quoted the text, " As Thou, Father, art 
in Me, and I in Thee, that they also may be 
one in us." He then repeated his convic- 
tion that natural immortality is not to be 
found in the New Testament. I pointed 

187 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

out, on the Hnes laid down by Renan, the 
difference between the Platonic view of Im- 
mortality and the Christian view of the 
Resurrection of the Body. I repeated what 
Renan says to the effect that there are at 
least two distinct views of Immortality. 
There is the Greek view, which divides man 
into two parts, body and soul, and which 
represents the soul as surviving without the 
body; this view seems to be entertained by 
the author of Ecclesiastes, who says, " Then 
shall the dust return to the earth as it was: 
and the spirit shall return unto God, who 
gave it." On the other hand, there is the 
distinctively Christian view of the Resurrec- 
tion of the Body, which does not assign to 
the soul an independent existence, but pro- 
nounces that soul and body together shall 
be raised at the last day. Mr. Gladstone 
seemed to agree; but, on my saying that 
one or two texts are not so easily reconciled 
with this opinion, he asked, " Which texts? " 
I quoted the words addressed to the dying 
thief; and added that this text certainly im- 
plied that the thief's soul would be in heaven 
while his body was decomposing in the 
earth. 

G. — ** Oh, there is no doubt that the New 
1 88 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Testament teaches throughout that the souls 
of the righteous will go to heaven imme- 
diately after their death.** 

T, — " If the righteous are to be severed 
from the wicked immediately after death, 
what need will there be for a Day of Judg- 
ment? Would it not be a strange anomaly 
that the dying thief and Dives should be 
called upon at the last day to make their 
defence before the Tribunal of God, if each 
of them, the former in Paradise and the lat- 
ter in * torments,' has already learnt by ex- 
perience what the final sentence on him is 
to be? Would not the condemned be entitled 
(adapting a famous line) to say of such a 
proceeding: * 'Tis like a trial after execu- 
tion '? " 

I fear that I cannot have made my reason- 
ing plain to Mr. Gladstone; for he answered 
with unusual heat, " I really cannot answer 
such questions. The Almighty never took 
me into His confidence as to why there is to 
be a Day of Judgment." I felt it was im- 
possible to press the matter further, and 
merely said something to the effect that the 
expectation of the immediate end of the world 
probably deterred the apostles from laying 
much stress on the condition of the dead in 

189 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

the interval before the general Resurrec- 
tion. 

Sir John Seeley somewhere, while express- 
ing his strong wish to retain the belief in 
immortality, has spoken of the belief in the 
Day of Judgment as indicating a certain 
want of culture in those who maintain it. 
He was of course referring to his own con- 
temporaries; and his remark would not have 
applied to persons who, like Mr. Gladstone, 
were a quarter of a century older. In Mr. 
Gladstone's mind this unsightly and withered 
branch of the popular theology was as fixed 
as in the mind of the Evangelical preacher 
who, in the days of my youth, edified his 
congregation by exclaiming: " In what form 
the Angel will appear I know no more than 
of what metal his trumpet will be made!" 
Shall I be thought disrespectful if I remark 
that this and one or two other sayings of 
Mr. Gladstone remind me of Walter Bage- 
hot's epigrammatic assertion that, " A Con- 
stitutional Statesman is in general a man of 
common opinions and uncommon abilities — r 
of the powers of a first-rate man and the 
creed of a second-rate man "? 

Mr. Gladstone rose to depart. I was 
always anxious in my conversations with him 

190 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

to refresh myself with a sort of old-world 
bath by hearing his recollections of his youth 
and middle life ; and I was disappointed that 
in this instance the conversation had drifted 
from the past and present to the future. 
As I walked with him to his hotel, I ob- 
served that, as Miss Gladstone had been so 
long at Newnham, he had probably often 
considered the question of the higher edu- 
cation of women and of their future demands. 
He replied that he had considered the ques- 
tion very often ; he was disposed to open 
the professions to them, but to exclude them 
from the franchise ; if they were once given 
the franchise, it would be hard to prevent 
their having everything else. 

T. — ** What do you mean by * everything 
else ' ? Do you mean that they would want 
to become Members of Parliament?" 

G. — '* Yes, and to become judges and 
generals." 

T. — " But surely, if they want to become 
generals, they would be told that they were, 
owing to physical causes, unfit for the army. 

G. — ** Oh, but they would answer that, if 
they were physically unfit to become gen- 
erals, they never would or could become 
generals." 

191 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

T. — **Yes; this is the kind of argument 
which Mill illustrated by saying that no law 
was ever passed forbidding men with weak 
arms to become blacksmiths." 

G. — " One concession, however, I would 
make to them. It seems to me perfectly 
scandalous that, out of the vast incomes of 
our two Universities, not a sixpence has ever 
been given to a woman." 

T, — " Would you have women made pro- 
fessors?" 

G. — " There might be difficulties about 
that. But they might be helpful in other 
ways. As compared with men, they are 
handicapped in the race of life; and they 
certainly ought to have their share of the 
University revenues. I remember urging 
this on Lightfoot at the time of the Uni- 
versity Commission ; but he thought that it 
would be too fundamental a change." 

January Zth, 1896. — Dined with Mr. 
Armitstead and the Gladstones; Lord and 
Lady Cranbourne were present. Mr. Glad- 
stone, speaking of the learned divine whose 
reminiscences of him I have quoted above, 
regretted that so excellent a man was obliged 
by weak health to live abroad. 

192 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G, — ** He would probably have risen to 
the highest distinction in the Church." 

T. — " Surely very many able clergymen, 
for various reasons, do not gain ecclesiastical 
preferments." 

G. — " No doubt that used to be the case. 
At the time of the Newmanite movement, 
every clergyman who took part in that move- 
ment was rigorously placed under a bann. 
But things are changed now." 

I spoke of Jowett as a very distinguished 
clergyman, who never received ecclesiastical 
preferment ; and the conversation drifted to 
Jowett's Sermon on Discourse. I said that 
on that occasion he chose a very odd text. 
A sermon is generally supposed to bear some 
relation to the text in its original sense ; and 
in this instance the selection of " Man shall 
not live by bread alone, but by every word 
that proceedeth out of the mouth,'' ^ suggests 
the notion that the dialogue with the Arch- 
fiend in the wilderness had turned on the 
best mode of being agreeable in society. 
Mr. Gladstone smiled, and acknowledged 
that sometimes Jowett's texts were cer- 
tainly peculiar; but, on the whole, the ser- 
mons seemed to him to be very interesting 
* The text is thus truncated by Jowett. 
13 193 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

and striking. He then came up to me with 
his edition of Butler's Analogy, and said, 
** This is my Butler." As I have to wear 
very peculiar spectacles, the field of my 
vision is limited; and Mr. Gladstone hap- 
pened to hold the book outside that field. 
I therefore did not see the book; but, 
chancing to see a gentleman in evening 
dress advancing towards me, I imagined 
that this must be the butler, who was in all 
probability bringing me my handkerchief, 
which I might have dropped on the staircase. 
This trivial incident is worth recording, as 
the mistake would scarcely have been made 
but for that peculiar inelastic and, so to say, 
stereotyped earnestness of manner which 
made it hard sometimes to tell whether Mr. 
Gladstone was speaking on a grave or on 
a light topic. 

At dinner the conversation began with the 
rainfall at Biarritz ; and I took the oppor- 
tunity of raising the question whether a dry 
or a damp climate is the more favourable to 
longevity. 

G. — ** There are some very curious facts 
about longevity. I will mention one. The 
proportion of centenarians in Scotland is 
about double of what it is in England, and 

194 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

in Ireland it is about double of what it is in 
Scotland." 

I asked whether that might not be due to 
the exaggeration of very old people. Were 
the registers as carefully kept in Ireland and 
Scotland as in England? 

G. — " I am speaking of the most recent 
returns." 

I asked whether the registers were kept 
with equal care in all three countries a hun- 
dred years ago, and reminded Mr. Gladstone 
of the difficulty which arises when one child 
dies and another, born some years later, is 
called by the same name. 

G.—'' I know that; but I think that this 
cause of error would exist equally in the 
three countries. The result seems to me 
very remarkable indeed." He went on to 
talk about Sir G. Cornwall Lewis, for whose 
judgment, except on matters of " finance," 
he had the highest respect ; but in his scepti- 
cism about centenarianism he was, in Mr. 
Gladstone's opinion, simply wrong. I ad- 
verted to my conversation with Sir G. Corn- 
wall Lewis (reported in Safe Studies, pp. 
37-43), which occurred only a few weeks be- 
fore his death, and in which he admitted that a 
few cases of centenarianism were established. 

195 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

G. — ** It appears, then, that, like the 
vaccinators, he changed his ground." 

T, — ** How have vaccinators changed their 
ground? " 

G. — " They began by saying that, if you 
are once vaccinated, you will never have 
small-pox ; then they said that you must be 
vaccinated twice ; and then that you must 
be vaccinated once in seven years! " 

T. — ** But I suppose that nearly all doc- 
tors are in favour of vaccination." 

G. — ** Yes; ninety-nine out of every hun- 
dred. But at one time medical opinion was 
in favour of inoculation. Indeed, they were 
very nearly making inoculation compulsory; 
whereas now it is penal." ^ 

T. — " But does not vaccination greatly 
diminish small-pox?" 

G. — ** Yes; but it has greatly increased 
the tendency to zymotic diseases. When- 
ever there is a zymotic tendency in the child 
from which the lymph is taken, that disease 
is transmitted to the vaccinated child. I 

^ There is a passage in She Stoops to Conquer which, 
even when allowance is made for comic exagg-e ration, 
shows how prevalent, in Goldsmith's day, was the belief in 
the beneficial effects of inoculation, " I vow," says Mrs. 
Hardcastle, "since inoculation began, there is no such 
thing to be seen as a plain woman." for tuna tcB nimium ! 

196 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

should have been afraid to tell my old friend, 
Sir Andrew Clarke, that I always feel a 
strong repulsion to seeing the clear, pure 
skin of a child made to break out into pus- 
tules." 

T. — " But are you opposed to vaccina- 
tion?" 

(9. — "No; but I dislike the idea of its 
being compulsory. I don't like the notion 
of the State stepping in between parent and 
child when it is not absolutely necessary. 
The State is generally a very bad nurse." 

T. — " If vaccinators have made a change 
of front, so, too, have thought-readers and 
clairvoyants. At one time it was said that, 
if you could hypnotise me, I might be able 
to inform you on topics previously unknown 
either to you or to me. It is now, I under- 
stand, merely said that what is in your mind 
may through some mysterious process be 
passed on to mine." 

G. — ■' I keep my judgment in suspense 
about thought-reading. I don't let myself 
be entangled in the belief in it ; but I am 
not violently opposed to it. There seems 
to be very strong evidence for the stories of 
second sight at the moment of death." 

He then gave an account of an old and 
197 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

faithful servant of his own, who took to 
drinking, suddenly decamped, and after- 
wards destroyed himself. On the morning 
after his disappearance Mr. Gladstone 
thought that he saw him waiting at the 
breakfast-table, and asked the butler whether 
he was not there. Mr. Gladstone had no rea- 
son to think that this occurred at the mo- 
ment of the servant's death; but he said it 
was the only occasion on which he remem- 
bered himself to have been the victim of an 
ocular delusion. One or two instances bear- 
ing on the question of second sight were told 
by a lady at table ; and she was advised by 
him to submit the facts to the Psychical 
Society. I told the story of a lady whose 
son died in Australia. She gave me the 
following account of what occurred : Though 
she knew that he was at the Antipodes, she 
suddenly heard his voice calling " Mother," 
and mentioned the fact to her daughter. 
They took a note of the time, which was 
5 p.m., and they afterwards learnt that " at 
that very moment he died. ' ' I presently led 
her on to say that it was at 5 p.m. that he 
had died. So she evidently had not made 
allowance for the difference between English 
and Australian time. On my subsequently 

198 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

cross-questioning the daughter, I learnt that 
the mother's attention had been called to 
this difference, but that she persisted in tell- 
ing the story in the old way. Also, to the 
best of the daughter's recollection, it was a 
mere hallucination of her mother's that she 
had mentioned the fact at the time to her. 
If, under the influence of strong emotion, 
the wish to believe could produce actual be- 
lief in this somewhat extreme instance, might 
not the same cause be expected to produce 
belief in other instances? The sorrowing 
friends who tell such tales are in a mytho- 
poeic, and, as Burns would have said, 
" ghaist-alluring " frame of mind; and for 
obvious reasons it is generally hard, if not 
impossible, to cross-question them. Mr. 
Gladstone listened; but evidently thought 
that my explanation would not cover all the 
cases. 

T, — " Suppose that the watchword, after 
being given to a sentinel, was discovered by 
the enemy, and that there was no possible 
way of accounting for the discovery except 
on the hypothesis either of treachery or of 
thought-reading. 

G. [^smiling) — ** If I was the General, I 
should have the sentinel shot." But he said 

199 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

nothing about the significance of such a case 
as a sort of negative evidence against thought- 
reading. 

He reverted to what was then his engross- 
ing topic, Mamii7igs Life. 

G. — " The worst of nearly all biographers 
is that they contain hardly anything but 
praise." 

T. — ** Is not that inevitable? The facts 
must be furnished by the family of the de- 
ceased, and the biographer feels bound to 
consider their feelings." 

G. — '* This may explain the unfortunate 
rule, but only adds value to such an excep- 
tion as Purcell's Life of the Cardinal. An- 
other great exception is Froude's Life of 
Carlyle. 

T. — " Some would say that Froude went 
into the opposite extreme. Do you not 
think Trevelyan's Life of Macaulay is an 
excellent piece of work? " 

G. — " Yes ; but he had no great difHculties 
to contend with. By the way, I once asked 
Dollinger, whose literary discernment im- 
pressed me more than that of any other 
man, what he thought of Macaulay's very 
peculiar style. I wanted to know how that 
style would strike a foreigner. Dollinger 

200 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

did not seem to see the exact point of my 
question, but answered : * I should admire 
Macaulay more if I was quite sure that he 
was not misleading me.' " I quoted Charles 
Austin's candid- friendly remark to Macau- 
lay: ** You always have by you some white 
and some black paint ; when you describe a 
Tory, you put on the black paint ; and, 
when you describe a Whig, the white.** 

G. — " I am sure that Macaulay was not 
consciously unfair ; but he was not impartial, 
like Hallam." 

T, — " You will remember what Macaulay 
said about Sir James Macintosh and Hallam. 
He thought that they were both eminently 
impartial; but that Macintosh was always 
inclined to indulgence, whilst Hallam was a 
hanging judge." 

G. — " Perhaps Hallam 's judgments are a 
little severe; but, on the whole, they are 
wonderfully just." 

T. — " Did you ever read the very touch- 
ing words which he wrote on the tomb of 
his son Arthur? " 

G. — " Did he not use an Italian phrase? " 

T. — " I was thinking of the Latin epi- 
taph." And I proceeded, as nearly as I 
could remember, to quote the words : 

201 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

" Vale, dulcissime, 

Vale, dilectissime desideratissime, 

Requiescas in pace, 

Pater ac Mater hie posthac requiescamus tecum 

Usque ad tubam." 

T. — " Charles Austin was surprised at 
Hallam's use of such very orthodox phrase- 
ology as that contained in the last three 
words." 

G. — ** Charles Austin may have been sur- 
prised but I am not. Hallam was a thor- 
ough Christian." 

T. — " You knew Arthur Hallam ; did you 
not?" 

G. — " Very well indeed. He was my 
greatest friend at Eton. Though we lived 
at some distance from each other, we used 
to breakfast each with the other on alternate 
weeks. He was quite the most rising man 
that I knew. He was so much above and 
beyond all the rest of us" — here he lifted 
up his arm with a symbolical gesture — *' that 
I wondered how he could manage to deal 
with us." 

I asked what was Arthur Hallam's age at 
the time of his death; and Mr. Gladstone 
showed how fresh everything about him was 
in his own memory by stating the month 

202 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

when he was born and the month when he 
died. 

T. — ** I suppose that you are a great 2.6,- 
raircv oi In Memoriam.'* 

(9.—" Yes. It is obscure in parts; but, 
on the whole, I admire it very much." 

Something was said about Tennyson's 
extreme sensitiveness. Mr. Gladstone ad- 
mitted that he was sensitive ; but he added 
that, for all that, Tennyson did not mind 
telling a story against himself. The poet 
himself had mentioned that long ago a friend 
of his, going to Freshwater, asked a rustic 
to tell him who were the chief inhabitants. 
On the names being mentioned of several 
persons not known to fame, the stranger 
inquired about Mr. Tennyson. " We don't 
think much of him," was the reply; "he 
keeps only one man-servant, and he sleeps 
out ! " I capped this anecdote by mention- 
ing that Tennyson had rather enjoyed telling 
the following story against Carlyle. Carlyle 
had gone to Cambridge during the long 
vacation, and, finding a stray undergraduate, 
asked him the names of some of the Col- 
leges. The young man kindly acted as 
cicerone, and did the honours of Cambridge. 
On parting, Carlyle said to him, " Thank 

20.^ 



Talks With Mr, Gladstone 

you, young man. Perhaps you may like to 
know that you have rendered a service to 
Thomas Carlyle ! " Looking somewhat sur- 
prised, this Verdant Green, jun., answered 
affably, ** Indeed, Mr. Thomas Carlyle, I 
am very glad to show Cambridge to a gentle- 
man who has never seen it before." One 
would like to have seen, or (better still) to 
have thought-read, Carlyle when the simple- 
minded undergraduate said that. Mr. Glad- 
stone remarked that he thought that '* Gui- 
nevere " was the one of Tennyson's poems 
that he liked best, and asked which was my 
favourite. After mentioning ** St. Agnes' 
Eve," ** QEnone," and the " Passing of 
Arthur" as the shorter poems which par- 
ticularly attract me, I said that it seems to 
me very interesting to contrast the tone of 
the earlier and of the later " Locksley 
Hall." 

G. — '* The second * Locksley Hall * ap- 
pears to me to make too gloomy a forecast. 
I wrote a criticism of it in the Nineteenth 
Century. " 

T. — " Are you not inclined to take a thor- 
oughly sanguine view of the prospects of this 
very reforming age?" 

G. — " Not altogether. The future is to 
204 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

me a blank. I cannot at all guess what is 
coming." 

T, — ** Do you mean that you are afraid 
that Democracy may bring everything to a 
dead level, or that Science is too hastily 
moving the old theological landmarks? ** 

G. — ** I am not so much afraid either of 
Democracy or of Science as of the love 
of money. This seems to me to be a grow- 
ing evil. Also, there is a danger from the 
growth of that dreadful military spirit." 

I asked him if he thought that, as is often 
said, the perfecting of the art of war will 
make wars more terrible, and therefore more 
dreaded; so that Suis et ipsa bella viribus 
ruent. He seemed uncertain. 

T. — ** Is not the moral standard of public 
men higher than it used to be?" 

G. — ** I should say that in England the 
change has been all the other way. About 
the Continent I am not so sure. {After a 
pause, ^ Since the retirement of Bismarck, 
Crispi would probably rank as the first of 
continental statesmen. I am no great ad- 
mirer of the public career either of Castle- 
reagh or of Metternich. But, judging as a 
moralist, I should say that the careers of 
Castlereagh and of Metternich would com- 

205 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

pare favourably with those of Bismarck and 
Crispi." Being asked by another of the 
party what he thought of Bismarck, he re- 
pHed, ** He is a very big man, but very 
unscrupulous." 

When Mr. Gladstone thus acknowledged 
that statesmanship had declined, the admis- 
sion seemed to me suggestive and signifi- 
cant. Was there not also a gradual decline 
of political ability during the great century 
of Athens? Were not the politicians of the 
time of Cleon smaller men than those either 
of the time of Themistocles or of the time 
of Pericles? And may not the deterioration 
of Athenian statesmanship in the fourth cen- 
tury B.C., and that of European statesman- 
ship in the nineteenth century A.D., be due 
in part to the same cause, namely, the ad- 
vance of Democracy? Or, to speak more 
precisely, do we not commonly find a good- 
lier fellowship of heroes and patriots when 
aristocracy and democracy are militant than 
when either aristocracy or democracy is 
triumphant? And, after all, are we not thus 
brought face to face with one of the aspects 
of the too familiar question whether, just as 
each one of us must expect his own physical 
strength, sooner or later, to dwindle and 

206 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

decay, even so the time must come to every 
civilised nation when the advancing tide of 
scepticism will bring destruction on public 
confidence, and indeed on belief in ideals of 
all sorts? 

q)BivEi juev idxvi "/TJi, tpBivEi de dGo^arCs, 
Qvi'/dHEi di 7tidTi<3, /3A.adrdvei 5', aTtidria. 

But, though such reflections obtruded them- 
selves upon me, I feared to embark on deep 
and stormy controversies, — ne parva Tyr- 
rhenum per cequor vela darem, — and I kept 
my musings to myself. Presently Mr. Glad- 
stone concluded with the melancholy ob- 
servation: ** Nowhere does the ideal enter 
so little as into politics ; nowhere does human 
conduct fall so far below the highest ethical 
standard. I did not always think this ; but 
I am convinced of it now." It is note- 
worthy that Mr. Gladstone's great rival has 
given utterance to an opinion which, though 
differently expressed, is seemingly of like 
import. ** There is nothing," says Disraeli, 
** in which the power of circumstance is 
more evident than in politics." After the 
ladies left the room, the conversation turned 
on the Premiership of Disraeli and on the 
ethical questions involved in Lord Salis- 

207 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

bury's acceptance of office under him, and 
in the late Lord Derby's resignation. From 
this part of our discourse I will only select 
one remark. ** I am convinced," said Mr. 
Gladstone, '* that acceptance of office is apt 
to be less sharply criticised than resignation. 
The motives which induce a man to resign 
are more severely scrutinised than those 
which induce a man to accept." The con- 
versation passed on to the art of oratory. 
One of the party mentioned that Sheridan 
is said to have put off preparing the Begum's 
speech to the last, and then to have devoted 
three nights to it. Surely this was not the 
way to be in trim for a great speech. 

G. — " No. Of course it was a fault; but 
the fault was on the right side. I have never 
found it succeed to prepare a speech long 
before. A speech so prepared is sure to lack 
freshness ; and freshness is a great element 
of success.'* 

Mr. Gladstone did not want the number 
of lawyers in the House of Commons to be 
increased: "They are too fond of putting 
their hands into the public purse. The chief 
exception to this rule was Jessel the Jew! " 

February Zth. — Mr. Gladstone liked the 
208 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

review of his Butler in the AthencBum. His 
critic sought to discredit the chronology of 
the Bible. He himself tried to defend it by- 
speaking of that of the Septuagint as prob- 
ably based on more trustworthy MSS. than 
those from which the Hebrew text is de- 
rived. He made the odd remark that, not 
merely the Hebrews, but the Chinese and 
Hindoos, did not claim millions of years for 
the antiquity of man. He tried to distin- 
guish biblical man from geological man. It 
seemed to him not merely an ** error," but 
** nonsense," on the part of men of science 
to affirm that the Greeks had descended from 
any race as low as the Esquimaux. I replied 
that, holding this opinion, he must presum- 
ably think it still greater nonsense for men 
of science to afifirm that the old Greeks could 
have been descended from such a creature 
as the ourang-outang. He answered vaguely 
that he was not prepared to deny that the 
Greeks might have ultimately come from 
protoplasm. What he complained of was 
that men of science were so confident in their 
assertions about the Ascent of Man. He 
passed on from this to the development of 
the colour sense. He reminded me that he 
had often contended that this sense was very 

209 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

imperfect in Homer. Homer had such an 
exquisite sense of the beauty of form, but 
seems strangely confused when speaking of 
colour. An eminent Jewish Rabbi had told 
him that the colour sense was also deficient 
amongst the old Hebrews. In the text in 
Psalm Ixiii. 13, " Yet shall ye be as the wings 
of a dove covered with silver, and her feath- 
ers like yellow gold," the concluding words 
should be ''green leaflets of gold." 

T. — *' Macaulay, in the introduction to 
one of his Lays, remarks that in our early 
national songs all the gold is red. The 
primitive colour blindness, if such it was, 
seems to have taken a variety of forms." 

G, — ** Undoubtedly. And yet my opin- 
ions on this subject drew on me the anathe- 
mas of Darwinian orthodoxy. Did you 
know there was such a thing as Darwinian 
orthodoxy? " 

T. — ** I am not sure. But, by way of 
parallel, I may mention that, many years 
ago, a near kinswoman of Cobden com- 
plained to me of Mill's unorthodoxy; and 
that, on my saying to her something vague 
about the unorthodox views of many mod- 
ern philosophers, she startled me by the 
interruption, * Oh, I am not referring to un- 

210 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

orthodoxy of that sort. I mean that he is 
unorthodox in Political Econo^ny. 

G. {smiling) — " That may illustrate what 
I mean. Some German Evolutionists said 
that I must be wrong, because some of the 
lower animals can be shown to have a well- 
developed sense of colour; and what they 
have, man must have." 

T, — ** Those Evolutionists talk great non- 
sense. They might as well say that, as 
birds and butterflies have wings, man must 
have them too. The answer would, of 
course, be that the organs in question had 
been atrophied by disuse. I am reminded 
of Pope's couplet — 

* Why has not man a microscopic eye ? 
For this plain reason — man is not a fly.' 

Goethe had said — no doubt, speaking meta- 
phorically — that the prolonged use of either 
the telescope or the microscope interferes 
with the normal use of the eye. And so 
likewise, if man had microscopic vision or 
any faculty utterly alien to his ordinary 
requirements, those ordinary requirements 
would tend to be neglected." 

G. — ** The controversy about the colour 
sense is still going on in Germany; but in 

211 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

fairness I must say that the majority of Ger- 
man writers do not seem to agree with me. 
I may mention one fact. I went into a 
children's hospital, and, observing that they 
were dressed in bright colours, I asked why 
this was, and was told that they preferred 
bright colours. I then asked at what age 
they began to show the preference, and was 
told that they showed it before they were a 
twelvemonth old." 

The conversation turned on the Jews, on 
their comparative immunity from certain 
diseases, and on the contradictory accounts 
of the comparative longevity of Jews and 
Gentiles. Mr. Gladstone thought highly of 
the Jews, and said that Sir Andrew Clarke, 
who had many Jewish patients, thought well 
of them morally. Mr. Gladstone had at one 
time gone into the question of the feeling 
entertained against pork by many Orientals. 
He consulted the two most learned men of 
his acquaintance, Dollinger and Lord Acton ; 
but these could tell him nothing about it. 
At last he thought he had obtained a clue. 
Whenever Homer speaks about the eating 
of pigs, it is always in connection with some 
Orientals. Pigs were eaten wholesale by the 
suitors of Penelope; but Mr. Gladstone con- 

212 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

sidered that the Ithacans were of Oriental 
or, as Homer would have said, of Phcenician 
descent. Indeed, he thought it significant 
that Homer had made his two Protagonists, 
Achilles and Odysseus, the former of Hel- 
lenic, the latter of Phoenician descent. Two 
things struck Mr. Gladstone about Orientals 
in reference to the pig. Their laws were 
constantly forbidding them to eat it; and 
they were constantly breaking those laws. 

T. — " Why are these two conditions found 
more among early Orientals than among 
early Europeans?" 

G. — ** Eating pork seems to be more liable 
to produce trichinosis in the East than in 
the West. On the other hand, Orientals 
found a pig diet very economical and con- 
venient. " 

T. — ** Why did not Europeans find it 
equally convenient?" 

G. — *' I don't know whether at that early 
time the domestic pig was common in Eu- 
rope, though the wild boar seems to have 
been known. The cat, likewise, does not 
seem to have made its way into Europe in 
the earliest times. With regard to the Jews, 
I am inclined to believe, with Max Miiller, 
that their great intellectual development did 

213 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

not occur until after they had been brought 
into contact with Aryan influences, that is, 
not until after the writing of the Septua- 
gint." _^ 

T. — " How, then, do you account for the 
genius of Isaiah? " 

G. — ** You must remember that Isaiah 
wrote under very peculiar conditions. I 
could give an e^^ample, within my own ex- 
perience, of the wonderful intellectual results 
which strong excitement may bring about. 
The prophets wrote under spiritual excite- 
ment of the strongest kind, which was, in 
fact, what we call inspiration. Many pass- 
ages in their Avritings and many of the Psalms 
have the greatest possible fascination for me, 
but I am confident that none of these old 
Hebrew writers could have produced the 
poems of Homer or the plays of yEschylus." 

Personally, I should have thought that the 
difference between the two forms of literary 
excellence was a difference rather of kind 
than of degree; Homer could no more have 
written like Isaiah than Isaiah could have 
written like Homer. I own I was much sur- 
prised at finding myself in this instance (so 
to say) more on the side of the Bible than 
Mr. Gladstone was. Did not his words in 

214 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

this instance seem to indicate a natural, as 
opposed to a supernatural, view of inspira- 
tion ? Was it not remarkable that the Greeks, 
without supernatural aid, could write better 
than the Hebrews with supernatural aid? 

I begged Mr. Gladstone to tell me the 
personal experience to which he had referred. 
He replied that he had been member for 
Newark at the time of the passing of the 
Poor Law in 1834. The new law aroused 
the strongest antagonism. He heard some 
of the people say, '* I would rather clem 
[starve] than go to the workhouse." One 
day he saw in the Nottingham newspaper a 
tragic account of the murder of four children 
by their father. The father confessed his 
guilt, and explained how he had strangled 
them all to prevent the risk of their having 
to end their days in the workhouse. The 
poor man, in describing the feelings which 
had led him to commit this atrocious act, 
was animated by such an intensity of pas- 
sion, and used such burning words, that Mr. 
Gladstone was at the timxe reminded of the 
description of Ugolino in Dante, a passage 
which he regarded as the finest in the In- 
ferno, if not in the entire Divina Commedia. 
I called his attention to what seemed to 
215 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

me the most conspicuous of all examples of 
the way in which an extraordinary stimulus 
may be given to literature and art. The 
literary glory of Athens maybe roughly said 
to have been confined to the century and a 
half after the battle of Marathon. It is hard 
to think that, during that period, the natural 
and hereditar}^ qualities of the Athenians 
were much superior to those of other Greeks. 

G, — * * Can that be so ? Surely an Athenian 
child was far better endowed by nature than 
a Spartan child." 

T. — " If an Athenian child received from 
nature far higher qualities than a Spartan or, 
let us say, a Boeotian child, how are we to 
account for the fact that before the fifth 
century B.C. Bceotia had produced at least 
two poets of the first order, while Attica had 
apparently not produced even one?" 

Mr. Gladstone admitted that he could not 
solve this difficulty. He merely remarked 
that, in his opinion, too little notice was 
taken of some of the earlier Greek poets; 
and thus he presently was led back to his 
favourite. Homer. He quoted the familiar 
Latin line about the seven cities which con- 
tended for the honour of having been 
Homer's birthplace: ''Smyrna, Rhodos, 

216 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

Colophon, Salamis, Chios, Argos, Athense,'* 
and he also repeated Heywood's couplet — 

" Seven cities warred for Homer being dead, 
Who living had no roofe to shrowd his head." 

G. — " Homer, like Shakespeare, towered 
so completely above all his contemporaries 
that there is no understanding how his age 
can have produced him. Do those Germans 
who doubt whether there was a Homer, at 
all remove the difficulty? Take the most 
moderate of the sceptics, the chorizontes. 
Does it help matters to say that one Homer 
may have produced the Iliad and another 
may have produced the Odyssey? It is hard 
enough to conceive how early times can have 
brought forth one Homer; but it would be 
harder still to suppose that they could have 
brought forth two. It is as if some critic, 
observing certain differences between Ham- 
let and Macbeth, were to declare that the 
Elizabethan age must have produced two 
Shakespeares. Really, the incredulity of 
sceptical critics astonishes me less than their 
credulity." 

I had been reading Bourget's Outre Mer 
where, along with democracy and science, 
the sentiment of race, of nationality, is 

217 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

spoken of as one of the great dangers of 
modern cIviHsation. I remarked to Mr. 
Gladstone that this feeling of nationality is 
sometimes thought to have been called into 
activity by Louis Napoleon, who, in fact, 
raised the cry, ** Italy for the Italians." 
Mr. Gladstone shook his head, and said that 
he was inclined to think that this sentiment 
was one of the legacies that we owe to the 
French Revolution, which certainly main- 
tained the principle of ** France for the 
French." He, however, acknowledged that 
this legacy of the Revolution was a long 
time in coming into active operation. 

T. — " Do you not think that the great 
armaments on the Continent are the indirect 
results of the improvement in the art of 
war? 

G. {smiling) — *' I am amused at your 
patriotic reservation. Why do you say, 
* on the Continent'? It might be con- 
tended that the sum of money spent on the 
army and navy in England is, as compared 
with the population, equal to that spent in 
foreign countries. In England, of course, 
more is expended on the navy; and the 
sums spent on the building of ships must be 
taken into account." 

218 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

I then reverted to my original point, and 
asked whether the improvements in the art 
of war do not oblige adjacent countries to 
keep their forces in readiness against each 
other. In former times, a country whose 
forces were not so kept was, no doubt, at a 
disadvantage at the beginning of a cam- 
paign. But in those times the disadvantage 
was of a kind which generally admitted of 
being afterwards remedied. In the wars of 
the present day, on the other hand, the 
consequences of the delay would probably 
be fatal. Mr. Gladstone agreed that there 
was probably a good deal in this explana- 
tion ; but he added that, not being a mili- 
tary man, he was not prepared to say 
whether other causes may not have been 
at work. I remembered that Bourget fears 
that perils may be in store for America from 
the exotic element, — that is to say, from the 
great and increasing numbers of German and 
other immigrants who are not bound to 
America by any patriotic tie, and who in 
many instances are Socialists, if not Anar- 
chists; did Mr. Gladstone think that there 
is any risk of a disruption of the Union? 

G. — " I think none whatever. At the 
time of the American Civil War, the Union 

219 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

was subjected to a tremendous strain. There 
was a threefold antagonism ; there was the 
opposition between the interests of some 
individual States and that of the Federation ; 
between emancipation and slavery; and be- 
tween Free Trade and Protection. Over 
these three dangers the Union triumphed; 
and I can see no dangers of equal magnitude 
to which it is now exposed." 

I went on to speak of the Venezuelan dis- 
pute; and I remarked that an American 
politician, at once very distinguished and 
very friendly to England, had lately said, 
in a private letter, that this dispute seemed 
to him merely a symptom of a widespread 
animosity felt towards England in the States. 

G. — ** I very much fear that it is so. And 
unfortunately this is not all. We seem to 
be unpopular all over the world. The 
French dislike us. The Dutch hate us, 
and naturally. The Germans showed what 
their feelings were by the way in which they 
seconded the monstrous and preposterous 
demand of thair Emperor. Now, when an 
individual is disliked by all his neighbours, 
one naturally asks whether he has not done 
something to deserve his unpopularity. 
And, in the same way, I cannot help won- 

220 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

dering whether, when England is so much 
disliked, it may not be to a great extent her 
own fault. Have you remarked that Eng- 
land has several times, of late years, sub- 
mitted an international dispute to arbitra- 
tion, and that the decision has generally 
been against her? This is to me a very 
unpleasant subject of reflection. The Eng- 
lish are a very strange people. They have 
very great qualities; but also they have 
great faults." 

He made a further comment on the Ger- 
man Emperor, which it is unnecessary to 
repeat. Suffice it to say that it was abun- 
dantly clear that he would fain have bestowed 
on his Majesty the Sophoclean benedic- 
tion : — 

GO Ttai, ysvoio Ttarpdi evrvx^^Tspo? 

As he was dilating on the unpopularity of 
the English, a thought passed through my 
mind resembling one which I have since 
come across in a letter of Jowett's: — " I do 
not think Europe has any deep hatred of us; 
only a petty jealousy of our sleek, well-fed 
appearance, and satisfaction with ourselves.'* 

^"O child, may'st thou be more fortunate than thy 
father, but in other respects be like him ! " 

221 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

But, without embarking on this wide ques- 
tion, I asked Mr. Gladstone whether he 
meant that the typical Englishman is apt to 
flaunt the " Civis Britannicus sum" in the 
presence of foreigners, and to walk about 
the Continent (in the manner alleged against 
him) as if, wherever he was, the whole place 
belonged to him. 

G. — " Yes. That is what I mean. The 
English are arrogant." 

T. — ** But is not the narrow insularity of 
John Bull gradually broadening as he sees 
more of his neighbours? " 

G. — ** I trust that it is; but your political 
friends are doing all that they can to arrest 
the improvement." 

T. — " Who are my political friends? Liv- 
ing abroad as I do, I try to keep outside 
politics, though no doubt I am biassed by 
my Conservative education and traditions." 

G. (smiling) — " I remember your once call- 
ing yourself a Whig; and I know by experi- 
ence that nowadays men who call themselves 
Whigs are nearly always supporters of the 
Salisbury Government ! Goodbye. God 
bless you." 

Yes; I feel, and shall always feel, the 
effects of my Conservative education. And 

222 



Talks With Mr. Gladstone 

yet, now that I was bidding farewell to the 
great Reformer, and could not shake off 
the foreboding that he and I might never 
meet again, I asked myself whether impartial 
history may not judge him worthy of as 
splendid a eulogy as that which Ovid be- 
stowed on a far less moral hero, whom at 
the time all classes delighted to honour : 

"Sancte Pater Patriae, tibi plebs, tibi curia nomen 
Hoc dedit, hoc dedimus nos tibi nomen eques." 

" Holy Father of thy Country ! This title the Senates 
and the Commons, this title we, the Knights, have con- 
ferred on thee. ' ' {A ddressed to the Emperor A ugustus. ) 



223 



